The skyscrapers huddled together in Downtown’s Financial District can be seen from far across predominantly low-rise LA and are enduring symbols of the city’s immense economic power. Much of the rest of Downtown is quite different, however, often quite danger­ous and always at least slightly intimi­dating for visitors.

Before LA clutched the automobile to its bosom, the city barely extended beyond what is now Downtown and the theatre-lined Broadway was the city’s most fashionable thoroughfare. Today’s Broadway provides popular shopping territory for LA’s immense Latino population, with a ceaseless procession milling around its cut-price T-shirt and electrical shops.

To the north, smaller but immeasur­ably more handsome than Downtown’s recent glass-and-steel towers, the 1928 City Hall, 200 N. Spring Street, is best explored with the aid of a guid­ed tour. Within a short walk of City Hall, Union Station, 800 N. Alameda Street, was completed in 1939 during the heyday of American rail travel. Its graceful design was based on the Spanish mission style and was intended to leave cross-country rail passengers in no doubt that they had arrived in California.

Detour – The Museum of Contemporary Art

When the frantic pace of Downtown streets saps your strength, aim to spend a relaxing hour or two inside the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA)(http://www.moca.org), 250 S. Grand Avenue, occupying an architecturally-acclaimed building designed by Arata Isozaki. Few famous works feature among MOCA’s permanent stock, but plenty of accomplished names crop up in its survey of American and European art trends from 1940 to the present. MOCA has also staged several much talked-about temporary exhibitions in its few years of existence, and in so doing has challenged – albeit in a minor way – New York’s long ­standing role as the fulcrum of modern art in the U.S.