Why Hollywood Park matters.
Hollywood Park is an expansive sports and entertainment district where Inglewood's performance culture meets sweeping contemporary architecture, public parkland and a new urban quarter built across the former Hollywood Park Racetrack.
Set along Prairie Avenue near Century Boulevard and just south of the Kia Forum, the 300-acre district occupies a broad section of Central Inglewood shaped by major entertainment venues, new streets, landscaped corridors and emerging residential and commercial blocks. Studio-MLA organized more than 25 acres of publicly accessible outdoor space through planted canyons, trails, plazas and Lake Park, using landforms and vegetation to temper the immense scale of the surrounding development. A six-acre artificial lake anchors the landscape, with upper and lower sections joined by cascades and planted edges drawn from Mediterranean-climate regions across Southern California, Chile, South Africa, southwestern Australia and the Mediterranean Basin. Rolling arroyos, bioswales and underground cisterns collect and treat stormwater across the site, with the lake combining reclaimed water and captured runoff as part of a district-scale reuse system. The result is a vast Inglewood destination whose parks, water infrastructure, pedestrian routes and sculpted terrain place a substantial public landscape around one of Southern California's largest concentrations of contemporary sports and entertainment architecture.
What defines Hollywood Park.
Hollywood Park is best known for transforming the former Hollywood Park Racetrack into a 300-acre district developed by Los Angeles Rams Owner and Chairman E. Stanley Kroenke. The site's first major era began when film figures Harry and Jack Warner joined prominent members of the motion-picture community in creating the Hollywood Turf Club, which opened on June 10, 1938. Arthur Froehlich contributed to the racetrack architecture, with Stiles O. Clements, Morgan, Walls & Clements, Frederick Barlow Jr. and interior designer Charles J. Aufferth Jr. among the practitioners associated with the original complex. Seabiscuit won the inaugural Hollywood Gold Cup during that first season, beginning a racing lineage later associated with Citation, Native Diver, Lava Man and Zenyatta. Citation's 1951 Hollywood Gold Cup victory made him American racing's first million-dollar earner, and Hollywood Park subsequently advanced wagering through innovations including the exacta and Pick Six. The track staged the inaugural Breeders' Cup in 1984 and hosted the event again in 1987 and 1997, giving the Inglewood course a central role in the championship's formative decades. Live racing ended on December 22, 2013 after a 75-year history, closing the sporting institution that had occupied the property through most of Inglewood's twentieth-century development.
Plans for a successor district had advanced years before the final race, with Wilson Meany leading planning for a 238-acre master plan whose entitlements were secured in 2009. The City of Inglewood adopted the Hollywood Park Specific Plan on July 8 that year, creating a development structure built around residences, commercial uses, entertainment and interconnected green spaces. A 2015 initiative subsequently authorized a football stadium, changing the scale and program of the undertaking after Kroenke acquired the principal property and an additional 60 acres. The resulting district encompasses close to 300 acres, with current plans including 890,000 square feet of retail and creative office space alongside residences and public landscapes. HKS and Studio-MLA became major design participants as the development grew around its sports and entertainment program, with the landscape architect involved before the football venue entered the plan. Hollywood Park later announced another major expansion in 2025: Hollywood Park Studios, planned initially as the International Broadcast Center for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games before conversion to film and television production use after the Games. The district carries the Hollywood Park name across two radically different eras, linking a racetrack created by the motion-picture community in 1938 with a twenty-first-century Inglewood development spanning housing, commerce, media production and public space.
How Hollywood Park fits.
Hollywood Park works as the anchor for an Inglewood outing connecting the city's championship-sports history, contemporary arena engineering and a major investment in youth music education.
Begin at Kia Forum, conceived by Los Angeles Kings owner Jack Kent Cooke with architect Charles Luckman and opened on December 30, 1967 for a Kings game. The circular arena became home to both the Kings and Los Angeles Lakers, placing Inglewood at the center of Southern California professional hockey and basketball through the following three decades; the 1984 Summer Olympics brought men's and women's basketball and the men's handball finals into the building. Aretha Franklin became its first musical performer in January 1968, preceding appearances by Led Zeppelin, Queen, Fleetwood Mac, Elton John and numerous other major acts. A substantial renovation beginning in 2012 reworked acoustics and converted former team facilities for performers before the building reopened in 2014 with six sold-out Eagles concerts. Continue to Intuit Dome, the LA Clippers arena that opened in August 2024 from a core design team led by AECOM with Anderson Barker Architects, Hood Design Studio, City Design Studio, Walter P. Moore, Henderson Engineering and Labib Funk & Associates. The 17,800-seat interior incorporates The Wall, an uninterrupted 51-row section behind one baseline, beneath a halo-shaped scoreboard carrying nearly an acre of double-sided displays. A structural gridshell wraps the arena and adjacent team functions, with naturally ventilated circulation areas connecting interior levels to Southern California's climate. Solar generation, on-site battery storage and an all-electric operating strategy formed another major component of a project developed alongside a $100 million community-benefits package negotiated with Inglewood. Conclude at Beckmen YOLA Center, the first permanent facility created specifically for Youth Orchestra Los Angeles, the LA Phil program founded in 2007 under Gustavo Dudamel and inspired by Venezuela's El Sistema. Frank Gehry volunteered his architectural services in 2018 and reworked a 1960s Security Pacific Bank branch into a 25,000-square-foot music center, retaining the existing footprint and facade as the interior underwent a dramatic acoustic conversion. Gehry excavated the floor and raised the roof to create a professionally proportioned performance hall surrounded by rehearsal and teaching rooms; construction began in 2019 and the Inglewood facility arrived in 2021 with support from Judith and Thomas L. Beckmen. The progression moves from Luckman and Cooke's arena for championship sport and major concerts through AECOM's technologically intensive home for the Clippers and culminates in Gehry and Dudamel's permanent center for youth orchestral education, tracing three generations of Inglewood institutions built around collective performance.
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