Los Angeles: Apr 29: Huntington Library/Museum/Gardens, and Food

I took many pictures this day. Di Yin did too. The latter link goes to her first picture from this day (picture #9 in the album). When you see a picture of us having brunch (picture #80), you're done with her pictures for the day. I'll link to the next day's pictures in the following post.

It began with us driving across L.A. to Pasadena. Surprisingly, on 110 near the center of the city, we passed through a series of tunnels. (A hill attempted to block the highway.) Pasadena is pretty, with tons of trees. I say this not in contrast to the rest of L.A.; there's just a lot of trees, period. It's a wealthy area. The residential part of it has fancy single-family houses.

We detoured to the neighboring town, San Marino, for lunch at Julienne. Julienne is in two-block-long commercial street in a residential area. We walked up and down it after lunch. As for lunch, it was very good; for details see the pictures.

From San Marino, we drove to the The Huntington Library/Museum/Garden, passing by/through CalTech on the way.

The Huntington is part botanical garden/park, with many themed gardens. We wandered through many (but not all) of these: the desert garden, the subtropical garden, the rose garden, and the herb garden. They were all very pretty; I took a ton of pictures. The Rose Garden was particularly notable because it was entirely in bloom. It's nicer than Portland's Rose Garden (supposedly world-famous), which I visited last year. We also stopped by the Japanese Garden and the Chinese garden but these were mostly closed.

It was a perfect temperature for strolling slowly with a hat to protect against the sun--a temperature that neither felt warm nor cold on your skin but rather neutral as if it was skin's natural temperature.

After exploring the gardens, we ventured into the Huntington art gallery. It presents European art (mostly eighteenth-century) in the Huntingtons' historic mansion, furnished and decorated according to the period. There was a free audioguide available but we didn't take the time. We were so short on time that we explored only the ground floor of the museum's two floors. We also skipped the American Art Gallery and the gallery housing changing exhibitions, both in other buildings.

We reserved a chunk of time for exploring the Huntington's third major facet: its library. We first explored its collection. Its old books include an old Chaucer, a Gutenberg Bible, a first-edition Paradise Lost, first-quarto and first-folio Shakespeare, early versions of The Life of Samuel Johnson and Gulliver's Travels, Audubon's huge book, various hand-written manuscripts, and much more, including some American documents. For instance, it has some Proceedings of the Continental Congress, a hand-written 1702 treaty between American settlers and the Mohawk Indians, and an original hand-written version of the thirteenth amendment. There was lots of info about each item. The collection reminded me a bit of the British Library (see visit report). Lots of items are the same (Gutenberg Bible, Audubon book, etc.).

We looked at the library's special exhibits. The exhibit on the regency didn't make much sense to me. In contrast, the history of science exhibits were rather good. One presented the history of astronomy through original texts by Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus, Einstein, Hubble, and others. Another showed the history of biology/medicine through anatomical atlases and many other books, including for instance an early printed edition (sixteen-century) of Hippocrates's sayings. A third room explored the history of light with original texts by Kepler, Faraday, Volta, Newton, and more, and also items such as early light bulbs.

In these history of science exhibits I didn't have anywhere near enough time to read everything I wanted to. We got kicked out because the library was closing. I wonder how much longer we could've stayed in the gardens before being told to leave. (Everything is scheduled to close at the same time, but it looked like no one was patrolling the gardens.)

By the way, Di Yin observed that the organization is so wealthy that not only are its objects of high quality but also is the setting they're presented in. For instance, the astronomy room has constellations painted on the ceiling, the art galleries have period decoration, and the history rooms have numerous animal paintings.

Three hours was too short for the Huntington complex. I probably could spend another three while only seeing things I didn't see before.

After closing, we drove back across L.A. to meet E at his place and began a food crawl! Details are on the pictures.

After the food crawl, we returned to E's, then Di Yin and I left for our other friends B and E to spend the night at their place in Encino.