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Until a century ago the area south of the Civic Center, Bunker Hill , was LA's most elegant neighborhood, its elaborate Victorian mansions and houses connected by funicular railroad to the growing business district down below. But after a half-century of decay, a wrecking-ball approach to 1960s urban renewal transformed it into an amorphous Financial District , sprouting colossal new fifty-story towers. The largest and most ambitious of these, the billion-dollar California Plaza on Grand Avenue, is based around the playfully colorful Museum of Contemporary Art ( MOCA ), designed by showman architect Arata Isozaki as a "small village in the valley of the skyscrapers" (Tues-Sun 11am-5pm, free Thurs 5-8pm; $8; ), but really a reddish array of blocky buildings. MOCA opened at the end of 1986, funded by a one-percent tax on all new downtown construction. In addition to work by Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg and Claes Oldenburg, and the impressive multimedia memorials of Antoni Tapies, it houses a compelling collection of paintings and sculpture by the rising stars you're likely to come across in trendy city galleries. A ticket also entitles you to same-day entry into The Geffen Contemporary (same hours as above), 152 N Central Ave, adjacent to Little Tokyo, 55,000 square feet of a former police garage initially used to display MOCA overspill, now a more raw-edged exhibition space, designed by LA's own Frank Gehry. Across from the Geffen, Little Tokyo is a pleasantly appealing collection of historic sites, restaurants and galleries, highlighted by the compelling Japanese American National Museum (Tues-Sun 10am-5pm; $6; ), covering all aspects of local Japanese history and culture. Back atop Bunker Hill, the shallow but amusing Wells Fargo Museum (Mon-Fri 9am-5pm; free), at the base of the shiny red towers of the Wells Fargo Center, tells the story of the bank of Gold Rush California. A block away rise the unmistakable glass tubes of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel . Its lobby doubles as a shopping mall and office complex - a disorienting Escher-style labyrinth of spiraling ramps and balconies that can only be negotiated with frequent recourse to the color-coded map.
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