Los Angeles Guide
Mid-Wilshire and the Miracle Mile
MID-WILSHIRE takes in the general area around Wilshire Boulevard between Downtown and Beverly Hills, running parallel to Hollywood to the north. Many visitors overlook the area, despite its being one of LA's best bets for revisiting the architecture of the early twentieth century, having escaped much of the redevelopment that has drastically transformed the more famous parts of town – at least until recently. You can take a chronological tour of LA history simply by driving west from Downtown, from the Art Deco piles of its eastern end to today's upscale shops and office blocks of the Westside.
Communities of middle-income Asians, old-money whites, working-class African Americans, diverse groups of Hispanics, and a small but growing bohemian contingent live within a few miles of each other along the Wilshire corridor. LA's most industrious ethnic enclave, Koreatown, has experienced renewed growth in recent decades with a slew of modernist office towers and three-story strip malls. To the west, just north of Wilshire Boulevard, many of the old Anglo-Saxon estates in places like Hancock Park visually recall their 1920s heyday, and are now populated by members of various ethnic groups, though still only one class – rich.
Further along Wilshire, the Miracle Mile is a classic shopping strip that boasts enough remaining Art Deco architecture to make a visit worthwhile, while the area's western side has been reincarnated as Museum Row, a collection of institutions celebrating everything from tar-soaked fossils to automobile culture, but especially noted for the presence of the huge, recently renovated LA County Museum of Art – one of the city's essential stops. Fairfax Avenue, west of Museum Row, takes you up to the human hive of the Farmers Market and through the geographical heart of the city's Jewish population. Further west, the Third Street shopping district, along with La Brea Avenue to the east, is where the trendy buy the latest designer clothes, eat in the smartest cafés, and hobnob with other would-be hipsters.