Exposition Park's Two Fall Openings, Decoded: Why 90037 Gets In Free First
September 17, 2026
September 17, 2026
Two institutions are about to open across the same stretch of Exposition Park, and neither one built its opening around a ribbon-cutting for outsiders. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens to the general public on September 22, but it opened to the 90037 zip code nine days earlier, on September 13, at a Neighborhood Preview Day distributed through local community partners. The California Science Center's Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center opens November 13, and when it does, it joins a museum that has never charged general admission for its permanent galleries in the first place. One of these institutions is a brand-new, billion-dollar private museum. The other is a 75-year-old state agency. They arrived at the same instinct independently, and that instinct is worth more attention than the exhibits themselves.
If you've read anything about the Lucas Museum this year, you've read about George Lucas's comic book collection, the Ma Yansong-designed building with no straight lines, or the Star Wars props sitting a few galleries down from Frida Kahlo. What gets less coverage is the LM37 pass: a permanent, ongoing free-admission program built exclusively for people who live in the museum's own zip code. Not "Angelenos welcome" in the abstract. Not a single discount day. A standing pass, renewable, that lets a 90037 resident and one guest walk in free every time, with proof of address checked on the first visit.
That's an unusual structural choice for an institution that spent thirteen years and roughly a billion dollars getting built. It's less unusual, though, if you look next door at the Natural History Museum, which made a version of the same bet three years earlier. When NHM went looking for a new food and beverage partner for its Commons expansion, it didn't take the easiest path and sign with a national contractor. It ran a competitive process that South LA Cafe won against much larger companies, then handed the winner a ten-year contract to run the museum's restaurant, its new grab-and-go café, and all of its catering. Celia Ward-Wallace, who co-founded South LA Cafe with her husband Joe, described the pitch this way:
"Think of Starbucks with soul."
The Lucas Museum's CEO, Tracey Bates, has used similar language about the museum's own opening: "we're really excited to bring such a significant art museum to South Central." Two organizations with almost nothing else in common, a private art foundation and a county-run science and history agency, both concluded that a new building in Exposition Park only works if the immediate neighborhood gets something more durable than a photo op. That's the pattern. Everything else below is evidence of how it plays out on the ground this fall.
The Lucas Museum sits on an 11-acre campus at One Lucas Plaza, directly across from the Natural History Museum. General admission is $25 for adults and $21 for seniors, with free entry for anyone 17 or younger, active-duty military, and EBT cardholders. Tickets are timed-entry and must be booked in advance even when admission is free, and reservations are currently open for visits through the end of February 2027.
You don't need a ticket at all to walk the museum's gardens, library, shop, café, or restaurant. The building itself is designed to be porous that way. A 185-foot arched steel canopy lifts the structure off the ground, creating a covered public plaza that stays open regardless of what's happening in the galleries above it. Two drop-in theaters, the Robert Flaherty Theater and the Slavko Vorkapich Theater, are included with paid admission and run documentary and experimental film programming alongside the permanent collection.
For residents of 90037 specifically, the LM37 pass is the detail that matters more than any single exhibit. Registration opened in August, and the museum has said it will keep expanding community programming, including after-hours events and performances in the surrounding gardens, once the initial opening rush settles.
Two months after the Lucas Museum opens, the California Science Center debuts the Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center, a 200,000-square-foot addition designed by ZGF Architects that will finally give Space Shuttle Endeavour a permanent, vertical launch-position display. Endeavour has been off view since 2023 while the building went up around it, a wait that will have run three years by the time doors open. The Science Center's general admission for its permanent galleries has always been free, and that policy extends to the new wing. Special exhibitions, IMAX screenings, and hands-on activities like the climbing wall still carry separate charges, but the core experience, including Endeavour itself, does not.
That's worth sitting with for a second. A California state agency is about to unveil one of the more technically ambitious museum additions in the country, and the price of admission for most of it will still be zero. It's the same free-first logic the Lucas Museum built into LM37, arrived at from the completely opposite direction: not a special carve-out for neighbors, but a baseline policy the institution has held for decades.
You don't have to wait for either opening to spend a morning in the park. The Exposition Park Rose Garden, a seven-acre sunken garden listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is open daily from 8:30 a.m. to dusk, no ticket required, with more than 200 rose varieties in bloom from April through December.
At the Natural History Museum, the Commons wing has been open and free since November 2024, and it's worth a visit on its own terms:
None of this requires a ticket. The Commons was designed as what NHM calls a "front porch," a way to interact with the museum without ever buying admission to the galleries behind it.
The Expo/Vermont E Line station sits at the edge of the park, at the intersection of Exposition Boulevard and Vermont Avenue, and puts you within walking distance of every building mentioned here. The Vermont/39th bus stop, served by Metro Lines 204 and 754, is adjacent to the Lucas Museum entrance. If you're coming from Downtown on the J Line, the 37th Street/USC station leaves a walk of roughly 10 to 15 minutes through the park itself, which is closed to through traffic and functions more like a campus than a city block.
The easy version of this story is "two big museums are opening near you." The more useful version is that the institutions shaping Exposition Park right now, old and new, public and private, have converged on treating the immediate neighborhood as something closer to an owner than an audience. That shows up in a free pass tied to a specific zip code, in a decade-long contract awarded to a local, minority-owned hospitality company over national competitors, and in a state science museum that never charged for its main galleries to begin with.
Whether or not you ever set foot in a gallery, that pattern says something about how the park around you is being built out for the next decade. It's not a coincidence repeated twice. It's becoming the operating assumption for anyone opening a door in Exposition Park.
If you're weighing what a home near a park like this is actually worth, in the context of what's opening and what's already free, The Jones Group Realtors has spent decades reading South LA block by block. Schedule a free consultation to talk through what these changes mean for your street specifically.
Stay up to date on the latest real estate trends.
Get assistance in determining current property value, crafting a competitive offer, writing and negotiating a contract, and much more. Contact me today.