Kia Forum
The arena where the Lakers played for 32 years still stands — held up by cables, not columns, in a design that was unlike anything else when it opened in 1967.
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Architect Charles Luckman built a pillar-free interior — rare at this scale — by suspending the 407-foot-diameter roof on cables. The Forum hosted the Lakers and Kings for three decades, two NBA All-Star Games (1972, 1983), and the 1984 Olympic basketball tournament. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2014, it was bought by Steve Ballmer in 2020 for $400 million and now runs as a concert venue.
What to look for
- The cable-suspended roof spanning approximately 407 feet — the structural trick that eliminated internal support pillars across the whole floor
- The site's position relative to SoFi Stadium and Intuit Dome, both visible to the south, making this corner of Inglewood a rare cluster of major venues
- The address on West Manchester Boulevard near Pincay Drive — about 3 miles east of LAX, so planes pass low overhead
On West Manchester Boulevard in Inglewood; check the event calendar before going — it operates as a live music venue and is only accessible on event nights.
Kia Forum is one of 33 sights worth the detour in Los Angeles, all bundled offline in Voyage GO — download the Los Angeles pack and it sits on your map with no signal, filling your travel passport the moment you walk past.
More to see in Los Angeles
- Hollywood Walk of Fame2,850 names pressed into pink terrazzo underfoot — actors, inventors, fictional characters, all at six-foot intervals for 1.3 miles.
- Dolby TheatreThe red carpet runs up these stairs every awards season — where Hollywood officially crowns its year.
- SoFi StadiumA million-square-foot canopy embedded with 27,000 LED pucks bright enough to be seen from planes descending into LAX.
- Hollywood SignA 1923 real-estate billboard that refused to come down — and ended up owning the word "Hollywood" itself.
- U.S. Bank TowerLA sold the sky above a fire-gutted library to fund its own rebuilding — and got its second-tallest tower in the bargain.
- Rose BowlA century-old sunken oval where the 1994 World Cup Final was settled — and the 2028 Olympics will return to do it again.