The Miracle Mile is a stretch of Wilshire Boulevard between Fairfax and La Brea, laid out in the 1920s by developer A.W. Ross as a shopping district designed for the automobile rather than the pedestrian — wide setbacks, generous parking, and bold signage meant to be read from a moving car. The Art Deco towers that survive from that era, like the green-and-gold Wiltern further east and the old May Company building on the corner of Fairfax, give the boulevard its period swagger.
Today the Mile is better known as Museum Row. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the largest art museum in the western United States, sprawls across the block, its forest of street lamps in Chris Burden's Urban Light installation now one of the city's most photographed spots. Next door the La Brea Tar Pits still bubble with the asphalt that trapped Ice Age mammoths and sabre-toothed cats, their bones now on display in the Page Museum. Across the street the Petersen Automotive Museum, wrapped in ribbons of red steel, celebrates LA's defining love affair with the car.
It is a tight, walkable cluster — three world-class collections within a few hundred metres — and an easy half-day on foot for anyone who would rather look at art and fossils than fight Westside traffic.