Long Beach Museum of Art

On our list of the best activities in Los Angeles.

The museum occupies a 1912 house built as a winter home for philanthropist Elizabeth Milbank Anderson, designed by the Milwaukee Building Company on a bluff over the ocean. Before the city bought it in 1950 to found a municipal art center, the building had served as a beach club, a private residence and a Navy facility during World War II. The permanent collection runs past 4,000 objects, concentrated in American decorative arts, early 20th-century European work and California Modernism, and the grounds look out toward the Queen Mary and Catalina Island. Claire's at the Museum serves weekend brunch on an outdoor patio.