Hancock Park (Los Angeles, California)

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Not to be confused with the neighborhood also called Hancock Park, this is actually a park.

Located at this park is a park area, plus the world famous La Brea Tar Pits, the Page Museum, and LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art).

The Tar Pits were the centerpiece of the park for decades and are ancient pits of bubbling ooze where ancient tar has seeped up from the ground in this area for tens of thousands of years, forming hundreds of sticky pools that trapped animals and plants that happened to enter. Over time, the asphalt fossilized the remains. The result is an incredibly rich collection of fossils dating from the last ice age.

Among the prehistoric species associated with the La Brea Tar Pits are mammoths, dire wolves, short-faced bears, ground sloths, and the state fossil of California, the saber-toothed cat, Smilodon californicus. Only one human has ever been found, a partial skeleton of a woman, dated at approximately 9,000 BP

The Page Museum is located at the Rancho La Brea Tar Pits in the heart of Los Angeles. Rancho La Brea is one of the world’s most famous fossil localities, recognized for having the largest and most diverse assemblage of extinct Ice Age plants and animals in the world. Visitors can learn about Los Angeles as it was between 10,000 and 40,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age, when animals such as saber-toothed cats and mammoths roamed the Los Angeles Basin. Through windows at the Page Museum Laboratory, visitors can watch bones being cleaned and repaired. Outside the Museum, in Hancock Park, life-size replicas of several extinct mammals are featured.

LACMA’s seven-building complex is located on twenty acres in the heart of Los Angeles, halfway between the ocean and downtown. The campus is undergoing a ten-year expansion and renovation known as the Transformation and designed by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop. The first phase of the project opened in early 2008, introducing an open-air pavilion called the BP Grand Entrance as well as the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA, featuring 60,000 square feet of exhibition space on three floors. LACMA’s collections encompass the geographic world and virtually the entire history of art. Among the museum’s special strengths are its holdings of Asian art, housed in part in the Bruce Goff-designed Pavilion for Japanese Art; Latin American art, ranging from pre-Columbian masterpieces to works by leading modern and contemporary artists including Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and José Clemente Orozco; and Islamic art, of which LACMA hosts one of the most significant collections in the world.