Whenever possible, a museum's site should reflect its subject. The Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles is admirable in this regard. The apparent front of the building, a converted department store, is situated on Wilshire Boulevard, but its main entrance is in the rear, adjacent to a multistory parking lot. This is as it should be, for the stretch of Wilshire Boulevard on which it stands is, in Reyner Banham's phrase, the nation's first "linear downtown." A creation of the automobile in the 1920s, Wilshire Boulevard's "Miracle Mile" consisted of an assortment of department stores and smaller shops with car accessibility and free parking as their key attractions.
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