There’s far more to LA than just Hollywood, downtown, and the west side. There are entire worlds below the 10, and you don’t have to go to Santa Monica or Venice to get some valuable sunbathing time amidst a wide array of weird, wonderful sights.
Long Beach is having a moment as both native and transplant Angelinos grapple with staggering housing costs and the loss of entertainment jobs and gigs. As veteran creatives and young professionals seek new places to spread their wings, Long Beach beckons since the rent is lower than LA proper, there’s easy access to the 710, 405, and 110 plus Metro rail, there are large and diverse queer and arts scenes, and it isn’t too far-flung if Hollywood comes calling again.
And the delightful weirdness doesn’t start and stop at being the home of the Donnie Darko House, among other elder Millennial cult film meccas: the City of Long Beach serves up underrated eats at incredibly reasonable prices and numerous, manifold small businesses dedicated to keeping the city weird. There are parks, culture, a massive convention center and race track, and restaurants with a smattering of nightlife for all tastes and budgets.
Whether you want to make weekend plans or do some adventuring if you’re hopping off a cruise ship docked there, here’s some fantastic oddities you need to check out in Long Beach.
Unexpected Tropical Adventures
Long Beach’s blocks may not have the miles of palm trees and vine-covered walls rich with signature bougainvillea and hollyhocks that you see all throughout LA County, but you’ve got plenty of tropical and desert flora and fauna right in the heart of the city.
Head to Gumbiner Park for a tiny patch of tropics and the Pacific Island Ethnic Art Museum, a small museum that’s worth your while and doesn’t require planning an entire day like LACMA or Exposition Park. Then if it’s a hot and sunny day out, you might catch Krono the giant Asian water monitor basking in the parking lot at JTK Reptiles if you need to stock up on crickets for your lizard.
Long Beach is best known for its actual beaches and docks, but you can also see a mini beach with actual wetlands in the Colorado Lagoon in eastern Long Beach away from the shoreline. While the city has a storied aquarium near the Port of Long Beach that merits a full-day plan, these are some low-cost or free alternatives to see small patches of nature where you least expect to.
Colorado Lagoon: 5059 E Colorado St
Gumbiner Park and Pacific Island Ethnic Art Museum: 695 Alamitos Ave
JTK Reptiles: 916 Pacific Coast Highway
Vintage and Queer Aesthetics on Retro Row
Retro Row is on the eastern side of 4th Street near Alamitos Beach, and as the name implies, it feels like you’re stepping back in time albeit with a modern patina on the signage. In a rising tide of endless corporatization, Retro Row provides an oasis of quaint independent shops dedicated to highly-specific niches like vintage clothes, cats, sustainably-sourced materials, plants, and queer leftist books.
You won’t want to shop at any of the big-box online dropshippers if you need an off-the-wall gift for the plant person in your life at Plantiitas, a large plant and garden store that also offers fun and quirky gifts. Plantiitas is also a community space with free and low-cost events. Some of them are geared towards plant parents, like terrarium workshops, while there’s also the occasional free Drag Bingo night and meditation sessions plus small community art markets.
If you’re the type who ends up killing every plant that comes into your home, Retro Row has tons of other options for you. Find your next fit at Starday Vintage next door, where you can also spot vintage home goods and accessories dating back to the 1950s. Further down the block to the east, at Cool Cat Collective, literally everything they sell is cats or geared towards cats. There’s a cat hospital conveniently located next door.
Retro Row is packed with a diverse cadre of independent restaurants and a handful of coffee shops and bakeries. One of the crown jewels is San and Wolves, a vegan Filipino bakery where you can find ube pastries, bibingkas, sago, pan de sal, ensaymadas, and other Filipino flavors that are all plant-based with some gluten-free options. Gusto Bread offers a relaxed coffee shop environment with fresh-baked sourdough loaves and buns that will keep you coming back for more every time you’re in the neighborhood.
Plantiitas: 2011 E 4th Street
San and Wolves: 3900 E 4th Street
Gusto Bread: 2710 E 4th Street
Dark Oddities in Downtown Long Beach
Downtown Long Beach is more than just the aquarium, racetracks, and name-brand hotels if you have to stop over before you take a cruise. There’s a plethora of wonderful weirdness here, some of which is historic with a couple new additions.
4th Horseman Pizza is a combination heavy metal bar and pizza shop, complete with a pool table and craft beer and wine. They sell pizza by the slice and the pie, although you’ll want to stick around for their aesthetically dark atmosphere reminiscent of a Rob Zombie music video from the late 90s.
At one time, they had a small oddities museum in the back. Eventually, their collection of weird relics grew so large that they kept a few displays for the bathrooms but moved everything else to the Dark Arts Emporium on 1st Street. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, the Dark Arts Emporium has now closed. They may be relocating to a new gallery space in downtown Long Beach or returning to their roots in the back of the back of 4th Horseman.
In addition to the obvious dark oddities like cursed dolls and pinned insect collections, Long Beach is home to some haunted lodging. Interestingly, the Dolly Varden Hotel, a vintage hotel on Pacific Avenue, does not carry a cursed legacy like the Cecil Hotel in DLTA and other haunted properties.
With the City and developers arguing over the fate of Dolly Varden since it oddly managed to preserve its landmark status only for its signage and not the actual hotel, it was slated to become apartments in 2023 but is still a hotel in late 2025, the time of writing.
No, the real haunted hotel is Room 217 at the Long Beach Marriott near LGB Airport. Apparently, if you’re staying there, a ghost likes the TV in that room and will treat you to some Poltergeist-style hauntings and tug at the bed covers.
4th Horseman Pizza: 121 W 4th Street
Dolly Varden Hotel: 335 Pacific Avenue
Long Beach Marriott: 4700 Airport Plaza Drive
Maritime and Pirate Adventures
If you’re a pirate aficionado, the type who religiously played the Monkey Island games growing up and saw every single Pirates of the Caribbean installment, Long Beach is the place for you. The Shoreline Village plaza near the water, full of different shops and restaurants with a view of the harbor, has an entire shop dedicated to pirate-themed goods, Pirate’s Cove.
At nearby Shoreline Aquatic Park, there’s also an annual Pirate Invasion festival that’s like a Renaissance Faire, except it’s entirely pirate-themed. If you’re an adult who’s ever said to yourself “I need more occasions in my life to dress up as a pirate”, Pirate Invasion has you covered! While there’s pirate-themed bands and bottles of rum, there’s also a family-friendly side of Pirate Invasion if you have little ones who also want an occasion other than Halloween to dress up as a pirate.
Being a major port, it’s unsurprising that Long Beach has a maritime past and present. In addition to all the pirate fun, there’s an interesting tidbit of maritime history docked at the Port of Long Beach just off of Queens Highway. The RMS Queen Mary, also known as Queen Mary Cunard, is permanently docked across the harbor from Shoreline Village. It’s a bit of a hike from the mainland, but you can take a water taxi.
The Queen Mary is more than just a retired ocean liner turned museum and hotel: the 1,019-foot ship is said to be haunted. It’s long been suspected that stories of these hauntings were exaggerated to drum up tourism, as the ship’s records show that 16 crew members and 41 passengers died onboard but mostly due to natural causes. However, there were a couple accidents onboard, including falling off the ship and a crew member who was crushed by a mechanical door. What paranormal enthusiasts suspect caused the future hauntings was the RMS Queen Mary’s escort ship, the HMS Curacoa, which sank and took 239 people with them. Other paranormal observations include flickering lights and slamming doors, the sound of screams, the ghost of a lady in white, and the ghost of a crew member in coveralls in the engine room where he died.
Why have one ghost at the Marriott when you can have hundreds on an old British ship? There’s a variety of guided tours you can take, including a few dedicated to paranormal phenomena and Halloween specials like Dark Harbor, and why have your wedding or corporate event at a banquet hall when you can host it on a haunted decommissioned ocean liner!
If being on a boat that long doesn’t appeal to you but you still need your tiny ship in a bottle fix, you can take a quick drive over the Seaside Freeway or hop the Commuter Express 142 bus to San Pedro on the other side of the harbor for the Los Angeles Maritime Museum.
Pirate’s Cove: 419 Shoreline Village Drive
RMS Queen Mary: Queens Highway
In a region known for reinvention, Long Beach stands out by simply staying unapologetically itself.
