LOT · EXPO PARK
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The Parking Lot
Strikes Back.
A filmmaker spent 17 years trying to build a museum. San Francisco fumbled it. Chicago sued it over a parking lot. So he built it on a parking lot in South LA. Here's how to do the billion-dollar cloud in Exposition Park: 13 easter eggs, the floor most people miss, the elevator trick, and the history nobody puts on the wall.
Chicago, June 2016. After two years of lawsuits over his museum on Chicago's lakefront, George Lucas walked away and said no one benefits from "unending litigation to protect a parking lot." The site he wanted was a parking lot south of Soldier Field. The park advocates suing him won.
Seven months later he picked Los Angeles. The site: two surface parking lots on Vermont Avenue in Exposition Park, across the street from USC, the film school he graduated from. Ten years, a pandemic and about a billion dollars later, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opened on September 22, 2026. Lucas said the project "almost broke my will."
It is not a Star Wars museum. Star Wars is one room. The rest is what Lucas calls narrative art: pictures that tell a story. Rockwell next to Kahlo, Peanuts next to Banksy, pulp covers next to the Sistine Chapel. He's been collecting since college. This manual is your route through it.
they fought a man for ten years to protect a parking lot. he went and turned a different parking lot into a temple. that's not revenge. that's art. same thing.
The case files
3 CITIES, 1 MANHOW IT ENDED UP HEREThe first plan was Crissy Field in the Presidio, a beaux-arts building meant to echo the Palace of Fine Arts. The Presidio Trust made him compete, Lucas complained to the press that they "made us jump through hoops," and in February 2014 the board rejected all three finalists. They'd offered him the site if he changed the design. He wouldn't. That plot is now a sporting goods store.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel courted him hard. Lucas married Chicagoan Mellody Hobson, his co-founder. Architect Ma Yansong drew a white mountain on the lake that critics compared to everything "from Space Mountain to Jabba the Hutt." The group Friends of the Parks sued over the lakefront land, a federal judge let the suit run, and in June 2016 the museum quit Chicago.
San Francisco tried to win him back with Treasure Island, in the middle of the Bay, with no federal board in the way. Youngstown, Ohio pitched too, and its mayor offered free land. Lucas kept Ma Yansong and ran LA and SF head to head.
January 2017: Exposition Park wins. Approved 2017, ground broken 2018, opening penciled for May 4th, 2021 (you know the joke). Then COVID and supply chains. It opened five years late.
Thirteen easter eggs
FIND THEMCOUNTING DOWN TO THE BEST ONEThe LM37 pass // a zip code easter egg
The museum's address is in zip code 90037. Anyone who lives in it gets the LM37 pass: free admission for you and a guest for as long as you live there. The other ~30 zip codes of South LA pay $25 and have said so loudly. Everyone 17 and under is free, and so are EBT cardholders and active-duty military.
It's a cloud. Everyone sees a spaceship. // the building
Ma Yansong designed a cloud. Every visitor sees a starship landing next to the Coliseum. Five floors and ~300,000 sq ft are wrapped in about 1,500 fiberglass panels, shaped with robot help, and the whole thing floats on a podium so you can walk underneath it. Stand in the plaza under the giant arch and look up: the oculus, a hole in the sky, is the building's signature. Ma calls the plaza "almost like a spiritual space."
The Hutt Slayer // bronze, in the garden
Remember Chicago's critics calling his building Jabba the Hutt? In the LA garden there's a massive bronze, The Hutt Slayer: Princess Leia choking Jabba to death, straight out of Return of the Jedi. Nobody's said it's a reply. We're just saying the timeline is funny. Nearby: a fountain with Yoda and Grogu, and a statue of Padmé. The garden is free, opens at 8am, and closes at sunset.
Banksy's bloody lions // 2nd floor, easy to walk past
On the second floor sit two classic garden lions on pedestals, the kind outside a bank. Look closer. The left one has a whip in its jaws and a bloody muzzle, and a black top hat is lying on the floor. The ringmaster didn't make it. The label just says "Pair of ornamental garden Lions with added parts," 2026. That's the whole joke, and it's Banksy's.
The original dogs playing poker // 4th floor
Every dorm poster of dogs playing poker traces back to Cassius Marcellus Coolidge. His Poker Game (1894) is the first of 18 oil paintings he made of dogs at the card table, and it hangs near a Frida Kahlo. That pairing is the whole museum in one wall: "low" art and "high" art, same room, no apology.
Where the collection started // framed, somewhere on 4
Lucas has collected since college. One early buy was an original Alley Oop strip, a caveman comic, for $30. It's framed in one of the galleries. Find it, and you've found patient zero of a 40,000-piece collection. Nearby rabbit holes: original Peanuts by Charles Schulz, The Far Side by Gary Larson, the first-ever Flash Gordon strip and a splash page from 1968's Black Panther.
The Sistine Chapel on the ground floor // on purpose
The intro show, The History of Narrative Art: Heroes, Myths, The Sacred, is mostly high-res screens and projections: a cave painting, the Venus of Willendorf, Michelangelo's ceiling. They're reproductions made with the real sites, because those things can't travel. Skim it. The originals are upstairs.
The labels barely talk // the big quirk
Most pieces get a name and a date and almost nothing else. The museum wants you to look, not read. For the story, you scan the code on your phone. Critics hate it. Practically: one reviewer's phone nearly died in four hours. Bring a charger.
Frida Kahlo, for her doctor // 4th floor
Self-Portrait Dedicated to Dr. Eloesser (1940): one of the few Kahlo self-portraits held outside Mexico. A former director called it "the Mona Lisa of Mexico." The details: a thorn necklace drawing blood, flowers in her hair, and earrings Picasso gave her. The banner reads "mi médico y mi mejor amigo", my doctor and my best friend: Leo Eloesser, the San Francisco surgeon who helped her through her chronic pain.
Sci-fi, manga, fantasy // 4th floor deep cuts
A costume from Close Encounters of the Third Kind sits near H.R. Giger drawings (the man who designed the Alien). The manga room has Pokémon paintings and a statue of Kaneda from Akira. The fantasy room has Paul Raymond Gregory's The Designs of Melkor, Tolkien's original dark lord. There's also a Batman costume and a Frank Frazetta. Plus lots of Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth, Jack Kirby and Beatrix Potter, and rooms named Childhood, School, Love and Community.
The Star Wars room // "Cinema," 4th floor
The Cinema gallery is all Star Wars, and it has its own line. Concept art, original costumes, props and vehicles from both trilogies, including Luke's landspeeder. The quirk: some of it is full-size builds that never existed in the films, like Anakin's podracer engines and General Grievous's wheel bike, which were mostly digital on screen. Also, a full-size Naboo starfighter hangs in the library lobby, which most people walk past on the way in.
The fifth floor // the elevator trick
The best room in the building is the one people miss. The Murals gallery on 5 has 25-foot ceilings and its own elevator, which you can only board from the fourth floor. Inside: a reproduction of Diego Rivera's 1933 Rockefeller Center mural, the one Nelson Rockefeller had destroyed (rebuilt from the copy Rivera painted in Mexico City); the color studies for Judy Baca's Great Wall of Los Angeles, a half-mile people's history painted along a flood channel in the Valley since 1974; and work by Charles White and John Biggers.
Twelve Banksys // 5th floor, next door
Right next to the murals: 12 Banksy works, in a museum, which almost never happens. There's Girl with Balloon painted on what looks like a chunk of wall cut out of a London street, a maquette of Flag Man, and new work made for this building, with an "R2" tagged inside a heart. Staff reportedly didn't know what was going in these rooms until the press preview, and the CEO couldn't say how the works got there. One more: the Wall Street Journal reported Banksy was central to how Lucas courted Mellody Hobson. The museum might be a love letter.
The run
🛸 MISSION PLANHALF A DAY. BRING A CHARGER.yep, that's me, stuck in an elevator line on the ground floor of a billion-dollar spaceship. you're probably wondering how i got here. i didn't read the manual.
1. Book a timed slot online. Everyone needs one, kids and members too. $25 adults, $21 over 65, free 17 and under. Closed Tuesdays (it opened on a Tuesday, though). Late nights: Friday till 9, Saturday 9 to 9. Last entry is 45 minutes before close.
2. Take the train. Metro E Line to Expo/Vermont, about a 7-minute walk, $1.75. Parking is $20 a day ($24 after 5pm), with no validation.
3. Garden first. Hutt Slayer, Yoda and Grogu, then stand under the oculus. Peek at the Naboo starfighter in the library lobby.
4. Go straight to 4, then up to 5 before the Star Wars room gets its line. The elevator bank in the lobby jams, so take the stairs if you can find them.
5. Then 4 at your own pace, with your phone scanning. Hit 2 for the lions on the way down. The ground-floor theaters are included with your ticket, and you can drop in and out.
6. End on the roof. Skywalker Grill doesn't need a museum ticket, stays open past closing, and does weekend brunch (book on Resy). Café and store are free to walk into too.
the fifth floor only opens from the fourth. like a secret level. i respect a building that hides its best stuff from people who don't read.
> tl;dr.exe
- Chicago sued him over a parking lot. So he built on a parking lot in LA.
- It's narrative art, not a Star Wars museum. Star Wars is one room.
- Garden: Leia choking Jabba, in bronze. Free, 8am to sunset.
- Floor 2: Banksy's lions. Check the whip and the top hat.
- Floor 4: Kahlo, the first dogs playing poker, the $30 Alley Oop, Akira, Giger.
- Floor 5 is the best room. Its elevator boards from 4 only. 12 Banksys.
- Labels are tiny. Scan with your phone. Bring a charger.
- Closed Tuesdays. Book a slot. Take the E Line.
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THE LEDGER
every hole in this manual, in one place. 18 doors. pick one. we're not responsible for where you end up.
OFFICIAL
- Lucas Museum of Narrative Art lucasmuseum.orgthe museum itself: tickets, hours, what's on
- LM37 pass lucasmuseum.orglive in 90037? you get in free
- Presidio Trust presidio.govthe park board that said no first
- Friends of the Parks fotp.orgthe Chicago park group that sued, and won
- Ma Yansong i-mad.comMAD Architects, the studio that drew the cloud
- Banksy banksy.co.ukthe only official Banksy site. no fakes.
- Judy Baca judybaca.comthe artist's own site
- E Line to Expo/Vermont metro.netMetro's own directions to the door
- Skywalker Grill lucasmuseum.orghours for the roof, the café and the store
RABBIT HOLES
- Cassius Marcellus Coolidge en.wikipedia.orgthe whole dogs-playing-poker saga, every painting
- H.R. Giger hrgigermuseum.comhis own museum, in a Swiss castle town
- Diego Rivera en.wikipedia.orgthe mural Rockefeller paid for, then smashed
READ
- unending litigation to protect a parking lot wbez.orgWBEZ, the day the museum quit Chicago
- Treasure Island sfstandard.comThe SF Standard on how San Francisco lost it, twice
- 12 Banksy works theartnewspaper.comThe Art Newspaper walks the murals floor
LOOK
- Exposition Park studio-mla.comStudio-MLA, the landscape people behind the park around it
- Peanuts schulzmuseum.orgthe Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa
- Great Wall of Los Angeles sparcinla.orgSPARC, the arts center that runs the wall: go see it
Made it to the end? You're a minion now.
New manuals drop every 13th. Get them first, read every one free, or slap a sticker somewhere to show you've been here.
found this printed somewhere? read it, then leave it somewhere weirder. field manuals are supposed to travel.