Walk east from Fairfax along Wilshire this month and you will pass a padlocked construction gate before you reach a line for iced matcha. Both belong to the same half-mile of Los Angeles' most concentrated museum district, and both are true at the same time. The La Brea Tar Pits closed its Page Museum to the public after July 6 for a two-year renovation. A few hundred feet away, LACMA's new David Geffen Galleries have been open since the spring, though the building itself is still filling in around the edges with restaurants that haven't opened yet.
If you live in Mid-Wilshire, the story isn't "Museum Row got an upgrade." It's that half of it just went dark for the better part of two years while the other half is still assembling itself piece by piece. Treating this stretch of Wilshire as one finished destination, or one closed construction zone, will get your Saturday wrong either way.
What Actually Closed, and For How Long
The Page Museum, the semi-subterranean building that has housed the tar pits' fossil collection since 1977, shut its doors to the public after July 6, 2026. It's the first phase of a $240 million master plan designed by Weiss/Manfredi, and it is not a quick refresh. Construction on phase one is expected to run from September 2026 through June 2028, timed to finish just ahead of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. The plan reshapes the berms that currently wall off the museum from the park, adds new gathering space, and replaces signage and landscaping across the full 13-acre site. It's the first comprehensive change to the property in roughly 50 years.
Here's the detail most people miss: the tar pits themselves aren't closing. Excavation continues in public view at Project 23, the active dig site near the park's edge, and researchers from the Samuel Oschin Global Center for Ice Age Research keep working onsite throughout construction. So the fossils, the bubbling asphalt, and the open-air pits along the walking path are all still there. What's gone until 2028 is the indoor museum experience, the mastodon skeletons, the exhibits that make this a rainy-day plan.
What LACMA Finished While You Weren't Looking
Next door, the timeline runs the opposite direction, but it's more staggered than the "grand opening" framing suggests. The Peter Zumthor-designed David Geffen Galleries, a $700 million-plus structure that arcs across Wilshire Boulevard on concrete piers, opened its exhibition floors to the public this spring. LACMA director Michael Govan called it "a hub of the dynamic activity across LACMA's entire campus" when the rollout began, and the building does function as a genuine crossing point, with staircases and elevators linking the north and south sides of the boulevard for the first time.
But the amenities inside are landing on their own separate schedule, not all at once. Erewhon opened a café in the northeast pavilion in April, serving coffee and pastries through the museum's member preview period and then to the general public in early May. Ray's and Stark Bar, the restaurant that anchored the old LACMA campus for over a decade, is reopening in a new space on the north side of Wilshire, but that move hasn't fully landed yet. A second restaurant and wine bar, honoring a gift from LACMA trustee Ann Colgin, her husband Joe Wender, and trustee Ryan Seacrest, is slated to open in fall 2026. A separate café on the north plaza, named for trustee Ashley Merrill and her husband Marc, is on the same 2026 timeline.
What that means practically: if you visited LACMA in April and thought you'd seen the finished building, you hadn't. The galleries were done. The food and beverage program was maybe a third of the way there. Anyone planning a fall visit around a specific restaurant should check what's actually taken over its space before showing up hungry.
Reading a Half-Mile That's Half Under Construction
This is the part that gets lost in coverage built for tourists rather than residents. A Saturday on the Mile this fall looks different depending on which direction you walk.
At the Fairfax end of the row, nothing has changed. The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and the Petersen Automotive Museum, both anchored at the Wilshire and Fairfax corner, are running their normal programming with no construction fencing in sight. République, in the 1929 building Charlie Chaplin originally built and La Brea Bakery later occupied, is serving its usual French-inspired menu. Nancy Silverton's Osteria Mozza is a few blocks south on Melrose. Fanny's, near the Academy Museum, is still a reasonable lunch stop between gallery visits.
Move a few blocks down Wilshire past LACMA and you hit the construction perimeter that will be there for close to two years. The Tar Pits' outdoor walking path and Project 23 remain accessible, so a walk through the park still works, just without the indoor exhibits. What doesn't work anymore is treating the Page Museum as a fallback plan for a slow afternoon. It's off the table until 2028.
The dining situation inside LACMA itself is the trickiest to plan around, because it keeps changing. A visit in September might catch Erewhon's café but nothing at the Colgin-Wender-Seacrest restaurant space. A visit in December could be different again. If you're the kind of resident who likes checking a museum's dining page before you go rather than guessing, that habit is going to pay off more this year than most.
What Changes When, Through the Rest of 2026
For anyone trying to plan around this rather than just react to it, here's the rough order these pieces are expected to land in:
- Now through fall 2026: LACMA's galleries, Erewhon café, and outdoor plaza spaces are open. The Colgin-Wender-Seacrest restaurant and the Merrill café are both still pending.
- September 2026: Phase one construction officially begins at the Tar Pits, following the July 6 closure of the Page Museum.
- Fall 2026: The Colgin-Wender-Seacrest restaurant and wine bar is expected to open, followed later in the year by the Merrill café and the relocated Ray's and Stark Bar, filling out a food and beverage program that started with Erewhon back in the spring.
- June 2028: Phase one of the Tar Pits renovation is set to finish, timed to the Los Angeles Olympics that summer.
None of this is a reason to avoid the block. It's a reason to stop assuming the block is either finished or closed. Right now it's neither. It's mid-transition on two separate timelines that happen to share a sidewalk, and the residents who get the most out of Museum Row this year will be the ones checking which half is running which clock before they park the car.
If you're weighing what a changing block like this means for a home nearby, or thinking through timing on a move in or around Mid-Wilshire, Walters | Plaxen Estates can walk you through it with the same attention to detail we bring to a listing launch. Step Into a New Standard.
