What are the opening hours?

Monday 9am - 9pm Tuesday 9am - 9pm Wednesday 9am - 9pm Thursday 9am - 9pm Friday 9am - 9pm Saturday 9am - 9pm Sunday 9am - 9pm

Obscure Los Angeles

Home
United States
Los Angeles, CA
Obscure Los Angeles

Directions Website Contact the business

L.A.’s coolest tour company offering unique group and private sightseeing tours.

10/07/2026

Towering over the intersection of Fickett Street and Wabash Avenue in Boyle Heights, you'll spot one of Los Angeles's vintage steel lattice utility poles. Erected primarily between the 1920s and 1940s, these miniature transmission towers were engineered by the LADWP and often shared with the old Red and Yellow Car lines to power the city's historic trolley network. Thanks to their incredibly durable riveted steel design, many of them are still in active use today, quietly routing high-voltage electricity through older neighborhoods. But what makes these structures truly special is how they absorb the life of the street around them. If you look closely at the base, past the wire mesh wrapped around the lower crossbeams to deter climbers, you'll usually find them doubling as community bulletin boards—like this one sporting a bright green flyer for a local sobador. It’s a perfect, everyday intersection of early twentieth-century infrastructure and modern neighborhood culture.

10/05/2026

While the Hollyhock House in Barnsdall Art Park enjoys the prestige of being a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the nearby Schindler Terrace has met a very different fate. In the early 1920s, heiress Aline Barnsdall commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design an ambitious hilltop residence. Because Wright spent much of his time in Japan working on the Imperial Hotel, the construction of Hollyhock House was largely left to be supervised by his son, Lloyd Wright, along with protégés Rudolph Schindler and, later, Richard Neutra.

The terrace was an important milestone in the evolution of California Modernism. It served as an early testing ground for the "textile block" construction made famous by the Ennis and Millard houses.

Sadly, the terrace sustained severe damage during the 1994 Northridge earthquake and has been fenced off ever since. I had a bit of an off-putting experience when I toured Barnsdall with a group of USC heritage preservation students. When we came to the terrace, they lamented its current state and gleefully daydreamed about remedying the situation by seizing the affordable housing below via eminent domain to expand on Schindler’s work. It illustrated an unfortunate disconnect between the people who task themselves with preserving our cultural landscape and the people who actually inhabit it.

10/03/2026

The BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir is the most impressive piece of architecture in Chino Hills. As the fifth temple of its kind in North America, it was built in strict accordance with ancient Hindu architectural principles. The main superstructure was constructed using 35,000 hand-carved, interlocking stones—entirely without the use of structural steel or cement. Despite relying on these traditional techniques, the temple was engineered to meet rigorous modern seismic standards, making it the only earthquake-proof Mandir in the world.

09/30/2026

Adams Pack Station, located in the hills above Sierra Madre, holds the distinction of being the last remaining animal pack station in Southern California and the only year-round pack station still operating in the Western United States. Its pack mules and donkeys serve as the sole means of delivering groceries, supplies, and building materials to the canyon's privately owned cabins and Sturtevant Camp, which opened in 1893. The animals typically take to the trails twice weekly for deliveries. When they aren't working, they can be found resting in their stables, where visitors can feed them apples and pet their cute little faces.

09/28/2026

You’ve seen it on squad cars, tax bills, and park signs, but do you actually know what’s on the Los Angeles County seal? 🏛️ From a humble bunch of grapes to constitutional crises over microscopic crosses and vanished Roman goddesses, the history of this municipal logo is wilder than you think. 🍇⚖️

LosAngelesCounty LocalHistory CaliforniaHistory DidYouKnow UrbanHistory

09/27/2026

The red sandstone ruins of Los Angeles County's 1891 courthouse are hiding in plain sight at a public park in City Terrace. The grand "temple of law" was only in use for about 40 years before being severely damaged in the 1933 Long Beach earthquake. When the courthouse was finally demolished, the county salvaged the massive broken pieces to help build a new park in City Terrace. Today, elements of the 19th-century building can still be found acting as landfill, fortifying retaining walls, and serving as historical decoration throughout the park's landscape.

09/25/2026

The miniature version of Hollywood is a lot more difficult to photograph than the real thing. Constructed during the Great Depression, the model is meant to evoke the excitement of Tinseltown in that era. While not 100% historically accurate, it does include handcrafted recreations of many famous nightclubs, studios, and hotels, and even features working streetlights. Originally conceived as a touring exhibit, the miniature has now returned home to Hollywood Boulevard under the care of Hollywood Heritage, which regularly offers ticketed viewing opportunities.

09/23/2026

Chances are, your high school didn't have an accredited museum on its campus. In fact, the only high school in the entire country with a nationally accredited museum on campus is The Webb Schools in Claremont, California, home to the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology. Raymond Alf was a science teacher who regularly took his students on paleontological field trips.

The students found so many fossils that Alf initially put together a small museum in the school's library basement. The collection soon outgrew that space and moved to its own dedicated facility in 1968. Today, it is bursting with prehistoric fossils—95% of which were discovered by students. The Webb Schools, where boarding tuition now exceeds $80,000 a year, has several notable alumni, including Gumby creator Art Clokey and Van Halen’s David Lee Roth. It’s fun to imagine the two of them digging for fossils together.

09/18/2026

When you think of Downey, your mind probably goes straight to The Carpenters or the oldest operating McDonald's. But this city also made a monumental contribution to the history of space travel. During the peak of the aerospace era, Downey was home to North American Aviation. This is exactly where the Apollo Command and Service Modules were designed and built for the lunar missions, and where the development for all of the Space Shuttles took place.

Today, that sprawling industrial complex is long gone—replaced by shopping centers and an interactive museum that serves as a national memorial to the crew lost on the Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003. Exploring the site now offers a fascinating look at what used to be, plus a few lighter touches. The museum features a cutout of Snoopy as an astronaut, a wonderful little addition I'm sure the original North American Aviation plant didn't have.

09/15/2026

One of my favorite obscure landmarks in Huntington Park is the five-story Cottage Reservoir and its wonderfully wonky marketing slogan. Designed to promote local commerce, a groovy illustration on its side proudly proclaims: "Shop in Huntington Park: More shops than a shopping center." It’s exactly the kind of redundant civic word salad that probably should have been rebranded decades ago, yet it survives today as a perfect vintage artifact of municipal PR.

Address

6727 1/8 Hollywood Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA
90028

Opening Hours

Monday	9am - 9pm
Tuesday	9am - 9pm
Wednesday	9am - 9pm
Thursday	9am - 9pm
Friday	9am - 9pm
Saturday	9am - 9pm
Sunday	9am - 9pm

Website

http://Coollatours.com/

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Obscure Los Angeles posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to Obscure Los Angeles:

Want your business to be the top-listed travel agency in Los Angeles?