Why Exposition Park matters.
Exposition Park is a historic civic campus where South Los Angeles's cultural concentration meets formal gardens, major museums and athletic venues assembled across more than 150 years of public development.
Set along Exposition Boulevard near Figueroa Street and just south of the University of Southern California, the park occupies a 160-acre campus whose museums, stadiums and landscaped grounds form one of Los Angeles's largest concentrations of cultural institutions. The Central Rose Garden extends across seven acres as a symmetrical landscape between major buildings, preserving the formal open space that developed from the earlier Sunken Garden. Broad pedestrian axes link the garden with institutional facades and plazas, giving the campus a legible arrangement despite the architectural diversity accumulated across successive decades. Mature trees and lawns soften transitions between Beaux-Arts architecture, twentieth-century museum buildings and large athletic structures, creating substantial public ground between institutions with radically different scales. The result is a civic campus where formal landscape, grand architecture, museums and sports facilities reveal successive chapters of Los Angeles development within a single interconnected public precinct.
What defines Exposition Park.
Exposition Park is best known for evolving from a nineteenth-century agricultural fairground into a major Los Angeles cultural and athletic campus through an unusual partnership among state, county and city government. The site began in 1872 as a 160-acre agricultural fairground known as Agricultural Park, where fairs existed alongside horse racing and other entertainment. California, Los Angeles County and the City of Los Angeles jointly acquired the property in 1889, laying the institutional foundation for the tripartite ownership structure that continues into the present. Attorney and Sunday school teacher William Miller Bowen led a campaign during the following decades to replace gambling and saloons at the grounds with educational and cultural institutions. His effort produced a 1910 plan dividing responsibilities among the three governments: California would construct an exposition building, Los Angeles County would create a history and art museum, and the city would develop landscaped grounds. Agricultural Park received the Exposition Park name in December 1910 as construction advanced on the new civic campus. The Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science, and Art and the wider park formally opened on November 6, 1913 during a two-week celebration coordinated with completion of the Owens River Aqueduct. U.S. Senator John D. Works dedicated a fountain commemorating the aqueduct in the central sunken garden, where a 30-foot water jet marked the ceremony. The original museum later divided its collections, with its art department moving to the newly established Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1963 and the Exposition Park institution becoming the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
The park's athletic history developed through a separate sequence that connected Los Angeles civic ambition with international competition. John and Donald Parkinson designed the LA Memorial Coliseum after its 1921 commission as a memorial to local World War I veterans, and construction finished in May 1923 with an original capacity of 75,000 and preliminary construction costs of $954,873. The 1932 Summer Olympics brought 101,022 spectators into the Coliseum for the opening ceremony, with athletes representing 37 countries and a newly developed Olympic Village housing competitors away from the stadium. Those Games pioneered the three-tier medal podium that subsequently became standard Olympic practice. Los Angeles returned to the venue for the 1984 Summer Olympics, making the Coliseum the first stadium to host the Summer Games twice; more than 80,000 spectators filled it for the opening and closing ceremonies. Exposition Park's institutional range expanded further through the California African American Museum, established by the state in 1977 and operating formally from 1981 before moving into its Jack Haywood and Vince Proby-designed permanent building in 1984. Its inaugural permanent-home exhibition, The Black Olympians 1904-1984, was curated by Lonnie Bunch during the Los Angeles Games. Another major expansion arrives on September 22, 2026, when George Lucas and Mellody Hobson's Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens a 300,000-square-foot Ma Yansong-designed building within a 13-acre campus landscaped by Mia Lehrer and Studio-MLA. These successive athletic and cultural projects have kept Exposition Park expanding far beyond the civic campus conceived at the beginning of the twentieth century.
How Exposition Park fits.
Exposition Park works as the anchor for an outing through the campus that connects Los Angeles natural history, African American art and culture, and a stadium whose Olympic history spans nearly a century.
Begin at Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, whose original institution opened in 1913 as the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science, and Art and secured exclusive rights that year to excavate prehistoric remains from Rancho La Brea. Its early science galleries became closely associated with those fossil discoveries before the specimens moved to the George C. Page Museum in 1976. The historic Rotunda preserves a stained-glass dome designed by Walter Horace Judson and Three Graces, a sculptural group by Julia Bracken Wendt; Judson's grandson David later directed restoration of the stained glass during the 1913 Building's twenty-first-century rehabilitation. Continue to California African American Museum, created after a multiyear campaign that made it the first African American museum of art, history and culture fully supported by a state. Aurelia Brooks became its first director, and the first object acquired for the permanent collection was Richmond Barthé's bronze bust of civil-rights leader Mary McLeod Bethune. The institution now holds 5,000 objects spanning historical artifacts, portraiture, landscape painting and modern and contemporary art, with particular strength in African American life in California and the American West. Its 1984 opening exhibition in the permanent building placed Olympic history beside the work of curator Lonnie Bunch, decades before his leadership of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. Conclude at LA Memorial Coliseum, where the Parkinsons' vast 1923 bowl became one of the defining stages of Los Angeles sports history. USC football established its long association with the stadium during its opening year, and later tenants included the UCLA Bruins, Los Angeles Rams, Raiders, Chargers and Dodgers. The Dodgers played there between 1958 and 1960, bringing the 1959 World Series into a building created for football and civic performance, and the Coliseum also hosted Super Bowls I and VII. Its 1984 designation as a National Historic Landmark recognized a building already linked with two Olympiads, and the 2028 Games will add another Olympic chapter to that history. The progression moves from a museum shaped by Los Angeles scientific collecting through a state institution devoted to African American art and history and culminates in a stadium whose changing uses connect collegiate athletics, professional sports and three eras of Olympic Los Angeles.
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