The hook
A cliffside neighborhood in San Pedro slid into the ocean starting in 1929, and the broken streets and foundations are still out there on the bluff, tilted and graffitied, behind a fence people keep breaking.
01Why it's worth it
In the early 1920s a developer built about forty upscale bungalows on a picturesque cliff at the tip of San Pedro. In 1929 the ground under them began to move, at the worst nearly a foot a day, and carried the houses, the street, the streetcar tracks, and the sidewalks toward the sea. What settled is the Sunken City: a jumble of cracked pavement, curbs that run off into nothing, and slabs of foundation tilted at the sky, all of it covered now in decades of graffiti, on a bluff with a long view down the coast. The city fenced it off years ago, because the cliff is genuinely unstable and people have died here, and posted trespassing fines; the fence gets breached about as fast as it goes up. So this is an honest one. It's officially closed and it's dangerous, a slow-motion disaster you aren't supposed to be standing in, and people go anyway, at their own risk.
02How to experience it
It's at Point Fermin, at the south end of Los Angeles past the lighthouse. The area is fenced and posted with real fines and real cliff danger, so take this as a look from the edge rather than a place the atlas is sending you into. Point Fermin Park and its lighthouse right next door give you the same coastline, legally and easily.