Petersen Automotive Museum, Automobile museum in Miracle Mile, Los Angeles, US.
The Petersen Automotive Museum is an automobile museum on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile neighborhood of Los Angeles. Its facade is covered in thick, wavy horizontal red and white stripes, with an exposed white steel frame of large loops and arches rising above the roofline. Blue street signs for Fairfax Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard are mounted on the front.
Robert E. Petersen and his wife Margie founded the museum on June 11, 1994, after it began within the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. It moved to a Welton Becket-designed building that opened in 1962 as a short-lived Seibu department store, then housed Ohrbach's from 1965 to 1986. A $125 million renovation by Kohn Pedersen Fox, finished in 2015, added the steel-ribbon facade.
The building carries the name of its founder, a publisher of automotive magazines who documented California's enthusiasm for vehicles. Visitors today see how individual car designs shaped ideas of mobility and freedom in this city.
This museum sits at 6060 Wilshire Boulevard and opens daily from 10 AM to 5 PM. Guided tours through the basement vault can be reserved in advance.
The basement vault holds about half of the museum's roughly 300 cars, among them the 1989 Batmobile from Batman and Batman Returns and the DeLorean time machine from Back to the Future. Access requires an admission premium and age restrictions apply.
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