Museum Row: A Morning on Wilshire

La Brea Tar Pits

Real asphalt still bubbles up through the ground here, just as it has for 50,000 years, in the middle of Los Angeles.

You are standing at the edge of the Lake Pit, and yes, it smells exactly like a freshly paved road on a hot day. That is real asphalt bubbling up from an oil field a thousand feet below you. The pit itself is not natural. It is a leftover from asphalt mining in the late 1800s.

Rain and groundwater have filled it into a small lake. Those three bronze mammoths on the far bank are Columbian mammoths, and the one sinking into the tar is doing exactly what actual mammoths did here between 10,000 and 50,000 years ago. Paleontologists have pulled more than three and a half million fossils from these grounds. Dire wolves outnumber every other animal.

The museum behind you has a wall with 400 dire wolf skulls stacked floor to ceiling. It is closed for renovation right now, but the park around you is open, free, and still actively producing fossils. Look down at the grass near the pathways. You will see small seeps of asphalt pushing up through the dirt.

The ground here has not stopped behaving the way it has for 50,000 years. When you are ready, turn toward Wilshire Boulevard. We are crossing to the south side.

Urban Light

202 restored cast-iron streetlamps, salvaged from all over Los Angeles, stand in a dense grid at LACMA's Wilshire entrance.

Step into the grid. There are 202 cast-iron streetlamps here, arranged in rows that are not quite a grid. Depending on where you stand, they line up at different angles, and that asymmetry is deliberate. Chris Burden, the artist, bought his first lamp at the Rose Bowl flea market.

He was not planning a sculpture. He just liked it. Within a year he had collected 70 of them from a man who had been saving discarded streetlamps from Los Angeles for two decades. The city was tearing them down and sending them to landfills.

Burden ended up with all 202. He had them sandblasted, powder-coated, and painted the same neutral gray so your eye catches the cast-iron decoration instead of the color. Each lamp is different: some have fluted columns, some have acanthus leaves, and six of them, the ones with the long finials that look like artichokes, are called Broadway Roses. They are the oldest in the group.

They predate the incandescent bulb. They originally ran on carbon arc, and a man with a ladder had to come every few days and crank the rods to keep the spark gap right. The lamps turn on at dusk and run until 10 p.m., powered by solar panels now. Burden said a city with working streetlamps is a city that is safe after dark and beautiful to behold.

You are at the Wilshire entrance of LACMA, the largest art museum in the western United States. Its permanent collection holds more than 150,000 works. But you do not need a ticket to walk among these lamps. When you are ready, continue west on Wilshire toward the intersection with Fairfax Avenue.