LACMA and the George C. Page Museum in Los Angeles
Near top Los Angeles hotels , a few miles west of downtown and a few miles east of the beach, travelers will find the Miracle Mile District, a part of Wilshire Boulevard that contains some of the city’s most popular museums, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the George C. Page Museum of the La Brea Discoveries, also known as the La Brea Tar Pits.
The county museum, known as LACMA , holds about 100,000 items in its collection, from ancient times to the present, and is the largest art museum in the Western United States. It attracts about a million visitors each year. It contains seven buildings on a twenty acre site and is in the process of a ten year expansion process known as the Transformation. The first phase opened two years ago and you can see the results: an outdoor pavilion known as the BP Grand Entrance and the Broad Contemporary Art Museum. The museum is closed on Wednesdays, but open on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays from noon to eight, noon to five on Fridays, and on Saturdays and Sundays, eleven to eight.
Right next door, the Page Museum is set against famous bubbling black pits of tar. The tar pits have been around for tens of thousands of years; the museum has only been open since 1977. The Page Museum provides a history of the area, including the numerous fossils of wolves and other animals trapped in the pits in ancient times. The museum is open daily from 9:30 am to 5:00 pm, and is free to the public on the first Tuesday of each month.