Gold Diggers Bar

On our lists of the best cocktail bars and live music venues in Los Angeles.

The building started in 1924 as an inn above a tavern on what was then Route 66, and the ground-floor bar ran for decades afterward as a local bikini club. Behind it, a 1940s annex became Ed Wood's sound stage in the 1950s, where he filmed Plan 9 from Outer Space, and later a rehearsal room where a pre-fame Guns N' Roses practiced under the name Hollywood Rose. Wood's original catwalks turned up intact during a later renovation and now sit exposed over the recording studio built in their place. Eleven hotel rooms and a live-music bar now share the same building under one 'bed and beverage' concept.