Mount Washington’s Southwest Museum and Nearby Walking Routes

Drive up Museum Drive on a Saturday afternoon and you'll pass the Southwest Museum's Mission Revival tower sitting exactly where it's sat since 1914, closed. No line at the tunnel entrance. No cars angling for the hilltop parking lot. The building once held one of the most significant collections of Native American art and artifacts in the country.

Keep driving another few minutes, though, and turn onto Wollam Street, and the picture flips. Cars line the curb. People are heading down into Elyria Canyon with dogs, strollers, and the specific unhurried pace of neighbors who've done this walk a hundred times before.

The closed museum and nearby canyon trail are two different parts of Mount Washington: one historic landmark and one outdoor space used by neighbors.

The Southwest Museum: history and closure

The Southwest Museum of the American Indian has a long history. Founded by Charles Fletcher Lummis in 1907 and moved to its permanent hilltop site above the Arroyo Seco in 1914, it was designed by architect Sumner Hunt and his partner Silas Burns and was the first museum in Los Angeles. The city designated it Historic-Cultural Monument No. 283, and in 2015 the National Trust for Historic Preservation named it a National Treasure, a designation recognizing the site's significance.

The Autry Museum absorbed the financially struggling Southwest Museum in 2003, and operations wound down over the following two decades until the campus closed entirely in September 2022, after a routine Los Angeles Fire Department inspection turned up safety concerns serious enough to shut public access altogether. Most of the collection, more than 400,000 Native objects according to reporting at the time, was relocated to a climate-controlled facility for long-term storage. As of January 2026, reporting on the property indicated the Autry is now looking to sell the historic site.

Elyria Canyon Park and nearby outdoor spaces

A short walk away, Elyria Canyon Park offers a different setting for time outdoors.

Elyria Canyon Park is a 35-acre nature park tucked into the southwestern slope of Mount Washington, managed by the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority, and it exists today only because it was saved from residential development. The main entrance sits off Wollam Street, with additional street-parking access from Bridgeport Drive and Burnell. The trails climb through coastal sage scrub, chaparral, and grassland, and the canyon protects one of the last remaining stands of California black walnut woodland left in the region. From the higher points, you can see the Los Angeles River, the Griffith Observatory, and the wider city skyline without ever leaving a residential neighborhood.

Nearby streets connect the park to other neighborhood destinations.

From the canyon, head up toward San Rafael Avenue and you'll pass Mount Washington Elementary before reaching the international headquarters of the Self-Realization Fellowship, whose meditation gardens are open to the public Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., free of charge. A few blocks further sits Moon Canyon Park, a quarter-mile out-and-back that's less a hiking destination than a reminder that even a sliver of green space earns its keep in a neighborhood this dense. From there, a left onto Sea View Drive picks up a loop street lined with Craftsman homes and unobstructed views north toward Eagle Rock and the Verdugo Mountains, where locals walk their dogs.

Put the whole route together and you get a two-hour, several-mile loop that touches a conservancy-owned canyon, a religious institution's public gardens, a pocket park, and a residential street.

The museum and the neighborhood around it

It would be easy to read the Southwest Museum's stalled status as evidence that Mount Washington's cultural infrastructure is fading. That's not quite what the facts support.

What they support is narrower and more useful: the neighborhood's daily rhythm and its most storied landmark are not the same thing. Elyria Canyon Park draws hikers on a Saturday morning. The Self-Realization Fellowship's gardens are open five days a week. Sea View Drive adds another neighborhood walking route.

A National Treasure designation speaks to the museum's historic status; it does not describe every part of neighborhood life. Mount Washington has both a closed historic landmark and a nearby public trail system that residents use.

If the Southwest Museum's future does resolve, whether through a buyer with a reuse plan or something else entirely, it will be worth another look. Until then, a Saturday visit to Wollam Street and Elyria Canyon offers a way to experience the neighborhood's parks and trails.

If you're curious what a hillside like this is actually worth to live on, not just to visit on a weekend walk, that's a longer conversation, and one worth having with someone who knows this hill block by block. The LA Home Girl Team has been reading Northeast LA's neighborhoods this closely for a long time. Help Me Sell, or just ask a question about the market up here. Either way, we're glad to talk it through.