Santa Monica Camera Obscura

The Midnight Special Bookstore was an independent bookstore in southern California. It catered to a leftist clientele. Its merchandise and events emphasized current events such as the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Chinese democracy movement and U.S. intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Georgian Hotel is a historic building in Santa Monica, California, in the United States. An eight story skyscraper designed in the Art Deco style, it opened as a hotel in 1933.At the height of the prohibition era, the hotel housed a speakeasy hidden at the basement level of the hotel which has since been restored. The hotel was purchased in 2020 by the BLVD Hospitality and has since reopened as a hotel.

The McClure Tunnel is a tunnel in Santa Monica, California, that connects Pacific Coast Highway (State Route 1) to its junction with the western terminus of the Santa Monica Freeway (Interstate 10). The tunnel passes through the Santa Monica ocean bluffs, underneath the Colorado Avenue–Ocean Avenue intersection and close to the Santa Monica Pier and southern end of Palisades Park. The length of the McClure Tunnel is about 400 feet (120 m). The current tunnel opened in 1936, replacing an earlier rail tunnel which had been bored in 1886. It was officially named the McClure Tunnel in 1979 after Robert E. McClure, a local newspaper publisher and member of the state highway commission.

The Mayfair Music Hall was an English music hall-styled vaudeville theater devised and created by entrepreneur Milt Larsen, located in Santa Monica, California. The theater was originally designed by architect Henry C. Hollwedel, and built in 1910 as the Santa Monica Opera House. On December 12, 1911, it opened under the new name Majestic Theater. When live shows proved unpopular, it featured silent movies and vaudeville acts. Milt Larsen transformed the venue into a Victorian music hall in 1972 and produced British variety shows there. In 1974, the theater was used to film the famous "Puttin' on the Ritz" sequence in Young Frankenstein. In 1974, it was used to film a scene for the pilot movie of The Rockford Files, which featured an acrobat and a dog act. In 1989, it housed the Los Angeles wing of The Second City comedy troupe. The theatre was damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake, and the owner gutted the building and removed all the ornate decor. As of 2019, the theater housed a Shoe Palace store.

Heal the Bay Aquarium, previously named the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium, is a private-public aquarium at a California State Beach Park managed by Los Angeles County Department of Beaches and Harbors, located beneath the Santa Monica Pier, adjacent to the Pacific Ocean. Since 2003, it is operated by Heal the Bay, a nonprofit organization. It was formerly known as the Ocean Discovery Center and was operated by UCLA until 2003.As Heal the Bay's marine education, advocacy, and community science facility, it is open to the general public and attracts more than 100,000 visitors from around the world per year (approximately 15,000 are students). This facility offers educational programs, activities, and special events dedicated to marine conservation, pollution prevention, and environmental education. Species on display include:

On the afternoon of July 16, 2003, George Weller, then age 86, drove his 1992 Buick LeSabre westbound down Arizona Avenue in Santa Monica, California, toward the city's popular Third Street Promenade. The last few blocks of the street, before it ends at the bluffs overlooking Pacific Coast Highway, had been closed to vehicle traffic for the biweekly farmers' market. Weller's car struck a 2003 Mercedes-Benz S430 sedan that had stopped to allow pedestrians through a crosswalk, then accelerated around a road closure sign, crashed through wooden sawhorses, and plowed through the busy marketplace crowd, traveling nearly 1,000 feet (300 m) at speeds between 40 and 60 mph (60 and 100 km/h). The entire sequence of collisions took at least ten seconds. By the time the car came to a halt, Weller had killed ten people and injured 70. Weller told investigators he had accidentally placed his foot on the accelerator pedal instead of the brake, then tried to brake but could not stop.On May 22, 2008, the Los Angeles Times reported that the City of Santa Monica had thus far paid out $21 million to settle dozens of civil lawsuits stemming from the case. The same article also noted that Weller, age 91, was now confined to his home and receiving 24-hour nursing care.Weller died on December 9, 2010, aged 94.

The Misfit is a bar and restaurant in Santa Monica, California.

The Clock Tower Building, built between 1929 and 1930 in Art Déco style, is the 4th highest skyscraper in Santa Monica. For around 40 years it held the record for the tallest building in the skyline. The skyscraper was commissioned by the Bay Cities Guaranty and Loan Association to the Californian architects Albert R. Walker (1881–1958) and Percy A. Eisen (1885–1946), whose firm, Walker & Eisen, with a staff of more than 50 draughtsmen, was the most important leading practice in California in the 1920s. Among its many completed projects, the firm had recently designed the extraordinary skyscraper in the Romanesque Revival style known as the Fine Arts Building in Los Angeles (now owned by Sorgente Group of America), one of the most representative buildings in the city. The Clock Tower Building occupies a rectangular lot located at 225 Santa Monica Boulevard, in the city’s business district and close to the main thoroughfare Third Street Promenade. The ground floor of the skyscraper, in the form of a compact parallelepipedal block surmounted by a tower, is occupied by retail spaces, and the upper stories by offices. The seemingly monolithic image of the building is actually enlivened by slight volumetric shifts that divide the high-rise into three sections: a wide basement level characterized by the large entrances to the retail areas; a robust second block, slightly tapered towards the top, that houses offices from the second floor to the twelfth, and lastly a square stepped tower which, placed off-centre with respect to the base, rises skywards and has clock-faces on each side – hence the name Clock Tower. The skyscraper, with a load-bearing structure in reinforced concrete and steel, is faced with slabs of limpid, pure white stone that both absorbs and reflects the bright light and the clear Californian sky. The large masses and wall decorations of the skyscraper are reminiscent of pre-Columbian architecture, the pure geometries of the stepped temples and the pureness of form found in Mayan and Inca building. The twelve office floors are crowned by a crenellated border, where the most ornate decorations on the cladding are concentrated. The tapered, stepped tower on the top is also faced with white marble slabs, which form a zigzag pattern in relief on the sides and around the edge of the summit; it is visible from everywhere in the city and rendered instantly recognizable due to its rectangular clock with four black dials (one on each side of the tower), and whose shining hands mark the exact time and are an urban signal in the city. Sorgente Group of America purchased the building in May 2013. The building houses The Misfit.

The Third Street Promenade is a pedestrian mall esplanade, shopping, dining and entertainment complex in the downtown area of Santa Monica, California which originally opened as the Santa Monica Mall on November 8, 1965. It is considered a premier shopping and dining district on the Westside and draws crowds from all over the Greater Los Angeles area. Due to easy access to Downtown Los Angeles via the Big Blue Bus rapid transit service, E Line's terminus station and the Pacific Coast Highway-Santa Monica Freeway Interstate, the neighborhood's north-south thoroughfares connecting to Muscle Beach, Venice Canal Historic District, Marina del Rey, Ballona Wetlands and Los Angeles International Airport, and its proximity to historic U.S. Route 66, Santa Monica Pier, Palisades Park, Tongva Park, Santa Monica State Beach and the Pacific Ocean coupled with Los Angeles's mild mediterranean climate, it is also a popular tourist destination.

The Santa Monica Looff Hippodrome is located on the Newcomb Pier adjacent to the Santa Monica Pier in Santa Monica, California. It was designed and built in 1916 by Charles I. D. Looff and his son Arthur to hold a Looff Carousel. Looff's carousel was housed at the Hippodrome until it was sold in 1939. It was replaced by Philadelphia Toboggan Company Carousel #62, which was moved from the Ocean Park Pier. The building remains a rare example of structures that used to be on the amusement pier, and scenes were filmed therein for the 1973 award-winning film, The Sting. Since 1977, the carousel has been owned by the city, and was restored from 1977 through 1981. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1987.

Santa Monica Place is an outdoor shopping mall in Santa Monica, California. The mall is located at the south end of Santa Monica's Third Street Promenade shopping district, two blocks from the beach and Santa Monica Pier. The mall originally opened in 1980 as an indoor mall, and underwent a massive, three-year reconstruction process beginning in January 2008 and re-opened as an outdoor shopping mall on August 6, 2010. The mall spans three levels. The mall also features the traditional retailer Nordstrom. The mall's tenant mix is predominantly upscale, featuring Tiffany & Co., Louis Vuitton, Tory Burch, Elie Tahari, and AllSaints.

The Beacon, known for many years as the Hotel Shangri-La, is a full-service boutique hotel located at 1301 Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, California. It is an example of Streamline Moderne architecture and Art Deco design. The Hotel Shangri-La is family-owned, and is currently run by Pakistani-American businesswoman Tehmina Adaya, who took over in 2004. Her late father, business and real estate tycoon Ahmad Adaya, purchased the hotel in 1983. The hotel reopened in October 2008 following a $30 million renovation. It was ranked as having one of the top five rooftop bars in Los Angeles in 2013 by The New Zealand Herald.The hotel was renamed The Beacon in February 2023, when Sonder Hospitality Group assumed management.