The four pages in this section describe Los Angeles after dark. Every road named on them exists, and every hour quoted is published somewhere you can go and look it up.
The Hollywood Sign has no lighting of its own. It is a grey shape after dark rather than a lit one. A 2023 proposal to put lights on it was canceled after opposition from hillside neighbors and from Friends of Griffith Park, on the grounds of what the lighting would do to birds. Photographs of the sign glowing at night are lit by something else.
The Inglewood Oil Field is the largest urban oil field in the United States. It sits in the Baldwin Hills between Culver City and Ladera Heights. A residential street runs along the bottom of the slope, with a chain-link fence between the houses and the pumpjacks. At night the field is a dark hole in a city that is otherwise lit end to end. That is the version of the place these pages are about.
Most of the city closes early
Griffith Observatory is free, and it shuts earlier than people expect of the most used viewpoint in the city. The park roads close behind it. Rangers work down the line of cars on Observatory Road, and people walk out in the dark to something parked as far away as Fern Dell.
Angels Flight carries two wooden cars, Sinai and Olivet, up the side of Bunker Hill between Hill Street and Olive Street. It stops for the night well before the office towers above it go dark. You step out of a railway car at the top into a plaza of glass, and on a weeknight there is nobody standing in it.
Canter's on Fairfax was famous for being open around the clock, and the dining room now does that on Saturdays only. Downtown, the Original Pantry served under a sign about a door that has no key until it closed, and the nonprofit that has taken it on says it will open again. The hours are posted on the doors.
- Inglewood Oil Field
- About 1,000 acres in the Baldwin Hills, discovered in 1924. A million people live within five miles of it.
- Griffith Observatory
- Free. Noon to 10 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. on weekends, closed Mondays.
- Griffith Park roads
- Generally 5 a.m. to 10:30 p.m.
- Angels Flight
- 298 feet of track. Open seven days, 6:45 a.m. to 10 p.m. A ride is $1.50, or 75 cents with a TAP card.
- Canter's Deli
- 419 North Fairfax Avenue, family run since 1931. Around the clock on Saturdays, with reduced dining room hours the rest of the week.
- The Original Pantry
- Open since 1924, closed in March 2025 after 101 years. Hope the Mission projects a 2026 reopening.
Four pages
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After midnight
Which roads are worth being on once the city has emptied out, and where to check what is closed before you leave.
Night drive
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The ridge
One road along the crest of the Santa Monica Mountains, and the gate hours that decide whether you can stop on it.
Mulholland
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The fog
Why so many mornings here start grey, and how far inland the deck gets before it thins.
Marine layer
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The last light
How long the warm light actually lasts at this latitude, and where to stand while it does.
Golden hour
What it sounds like
From a hillside the freeway is a flat hiss with no individual cars in it, and the pitch of it changes with the wind. A police helicopter holds over one block for twenty minutes. The rotor beat reaches you well before you find the searchlight. A steel gate rolls down over a storefront, and then the padlock. Red-crowned parrots cross a residential street at dusk in a flock loud enough to stop a conversation underneath them.
The photographs
Every photograph on this site was made by somebody else and shared under Creative Commons terms. Each one is listed with its photographer and its license on the credits page. Where an image is not a picture of the thing its page is about, the caption on it says so.
What this has to do with the music
One person makes this music in Los Angeles and it is synthwave, which is as much as the About page claims. Nothing has been released yet, and when that changes, every place to hear it will be on one page.
Angels Flight hours and fares are as published by the railway in August 2026.