Immersive Historical Art

Velaslavasay Panorama: A 360-Degree Journey Into History

Los Angeles, California, United States

By the Wicked Cool Places editors · Published Fri, Aug 28, 2026

Why it’s cool

This venue revives the lost art of panoramic paintings, surrounding visitors with massive landscapes inside a vintage theater complete with a secret garden.

West Coast Boutique

A panoramic painting of jagged, icy white and blue cliffs against a dark background in a dimly lit room.

Long before digital screens or virtual reality headsets, audiences sought immersion through massive, hand-painted landscapes. These panoramic displays dominated the late 18th and early 19th centuries, offering a 360-degree visual journey that predated modern cinema.

While photography and film eventually pushed these grand canvases into obscurity, the Velaslavasay Panorama keeps the tradition alive in Los Angeles.

Why It Stands Out

The venue itself is a piece of history, housed within the 1920s Union Theater. This building has lived many lives, serving as a silent film house and even a headquarters for a tile layers' union before becoming a home for panoramic art.

The tactile artistry of the panorama shares a creative spirit with the stop-motion work at Screen Novelties. Inside, the main attraction is a vast, circular painting that wraps around the viewer, enhanced by specialized lighting and soundscapes to create a transportive environment.

Beyond the main hall, the experience extends into the Alabaster Isle of Penglai. This backyard garden is a curated sanctuary filled with carnivorous plants and resident bunnies.

The theater often hosts eccentric programming that mirrors the showmanship of the Victorian era, ranging from performances on rare instruments to displays of complex automata. Nearby, the Heritage Square Museum also preserves the architectural heritage of this era.

Visitors can even pick up pamphlets detailing the lore of the grounds, maintaining the sense of spectacle that once made panoramas the most popular entertainment in the world.

Before You Go

The Velaslavasay Panorama is open to the public from Friday through Sunday between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. Finding the entrance to the panorama itself requires a bit of exploration.

Once inside the theater, look for a dark hallway branching off the main hall. This corridor leads to the stairway that ascends to the viewing platform.

Be sure to leave time to wander through the garden behind the theater to see the botanical collection and the resident animals.

Questions worth answering

What kind of experience should we expect inside?

The main hall holds a massive circular painting that wraps around you. It uses specific lighting and sound to mimic the immersive entertainment style popular in the 1800s.

How do we find the actual viewing area?

The path is not obvious. Look for a dim corridor off the main theater hall that leads to the stairs for the platform.

Is there anything to see besides the paintings?

The backyard contains a garden called the Alabaster Isle of Penglai. You will find carnivorous plants and a few resident rabbits living there.

When is the theater open for visitors?

Plan your visit for the weekend. Doors are open from 11 a.m. until 5 p.m. every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

Visit Snapshot

The site is open Friday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. To find the panorama, locate the dark hallway that branches off from the main theater hall, which contains the stairs to the exhibit.

Location

Los Angeles, California

Know before you go

The stairway to the panorama is not immediately obvious, but is accessed via a dark hallway branching off of the hall to the theater. The attraction is open Friday through Sunday from 11 to 5.

Editorial source

Velaslavasay Panorama

In the late 1700s and early 1800s a new form of interactive media was invented. Considered lowbrow at the time, it was the 3D movie of its day, a fully engaging visual experience for the masses known as panoramic paintings.

Generally displayed either in a large circular room, and surrounding the viewer, or occasionally stretched across two rollers like a ribbon and cranked across them to create a moving landscape for the audience, they were wildly popular in their day. Good panorama painters, such as John Banvard (who at one point painted a half-mile long panorama, the longest in the world at the time), were made rich and famous.

But with the advent of photography, optical toys and later film, panorama paintings all but disappeared, with most of the world forgetting they and their creators ever even existed. Taking a cue from these popular panoramic paintings, the Velaslavasay Panorama in Los Angeles is a curious throwback to this old medium.

Here, visitors are engaged once again in a fully immersive, 360-degree representation of landscape painting, complete with lighting and sound. Eventually, the rise of the motion picture industry aided in the demise of the panorama as an art form.

The Velaslavasay Panorama thus occupies a somewhat ironic location in an old 1920s silent-film theater and only draws more attention to how technology has drastically changed our visual experiences. The old Union Theater, which once served as a tile layers' union headquarters in the 1970s, is still used by The Velaslavasay Panorama Enthusiasts Society today.

In line with the "magnetic showmanship and spectacle" of this bygone era in media and Los Angeles culture, past events have featured Alpine yodelers, esoteric instruments and automata. The front desk even provides sensational pamphlets, such as one on The Alabaster Isle of Penglai, a garden behind the theater which is home to pet bunnies and carnivorous plants.