Hollywood's Free Museum Shuts Weekends. The $15 One Opens.

Both sit on North Highland. The next day you can do both is Thursday, November 5.

Madame Tussauds Hollywood wants $29 for a standard adult ticket and posted 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on the day we read it. Up Highland Avenue at number 2301, the Hollywood Bowl Museum charges nothing, shuts at 5, and stays dark every Saturday, Sunday and Monday until the summer season begins in June. On this street the wax keeps longer hours than the history. Settle the day before you settle the budget.

We read eight Hollywood institutions' own hours and admission pages on October 1, 2026, and counted the hours each one actually hands a visitor in an ordinary week. The useful answer isn't a ranking, it's a calendar: the two museums on North Highland that keep Hollywood's own history are open on opposite halves of the week, and they overlap on one day a month.

The free one is a weekday museum

The Hollywood Bowl Museum posts its admission as "FREE all year," and its off-season hours — mid-September through June, which is where the calendar is standing now — as Tuesday to Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., closed Saturday through Monday. It's at 2301 N. Highland, at the bottom of Peppertree Lane, and the museum's page calls it the first building you see coming in from Highland, so there's nothing to hunt for. Count the week: 28 hours, every one of them on a workday.

That's the catch, and it's a big one. A free museum that closes Saturday, Sunday and Monday is no use at all to anyone whose Hollywood day is a weekend. If yours is, the next entry is your door — and this one is worth a Tuesday of its own.

The $15 one is a weekend museum, and it's a state landmark

The Hollywood Heritage Museum posts $15 for adults, free for members and for children 12 and under, and opens Saturdays and Sundays from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., plus the first Thursday of the month on the same clock. Visitors park free until 3 p.m. in Hollywood Bowl Lot D, which is a Los Angeles parking sentence that ends in a time instead of a shrug. Eight hours a week, at 2100 N. Highland, a short walk down the same street from the free one.

What the $15 buys is the building. California's Office of Historic Preservation lists it as Historical Landmark No. 554, the Cecil B. DeMille Studio Barn, and records that DeMille rented half of the structure, then in use as a barn, as the studio where "the first feature-length motion picture in Hollywood" was made — The Squaw Man, 1913, with Jesse Lasky Sr. and Samuel Goldwyn. The same state record puts the barn's original corner at Selma and Vine and has Paramount taking it over in 1927. Hollywood Heritage, which runs the place, calls it the birthplace of Paramount Pictures and says volunteers restored the barn and opened it as a film museum in 1985.

The window: the first Thursday, and the next one is November 5

Line the two schedules up and they touch on exactly one day a month. Heritage's first-Thursday opening runs 11 to 3; the Bowl Museum's Tuesday-to-Friday block runs 10 to 5. So the only date on the calendar when both doors are open is a first Thursday — October's fell on the 1st, and the next one is Thursday, November 5.

Aim for 11 a.m. That buys the barn at opening, the walk down Highland, and the free museum with two hours still on its clock. If you slept in: arrive after 3 and the barn is already shut, but the free one is yours until five, which is not the worst consolation prize on this street.

The best free hour in Hollywood lasts 45 minutes

Here's the pick people will argue with, so let's say it plainly: the Walk of Fame — the stretch of sidewalk every national list files under "disappointing" — is the best free thing on Hollywood Boulevard on the mornings a star gets unveiled. The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce's own instructions page is unusually blunt about the terms: "There is a public viewing area for all Walk of Fame star ceremonies. There is no fee to attend, no tickets, no admission fees." The ceremony "begins promptly at 11:30 a.m. and will be over by 12:15 p.m."

The next one is Air Supply, and the Chamber's own announcement puts the 2,859th star on the Walk at 6126 Hollywood Boulevard on Thursday, October 8 at 11:30 a.m., in the Recording category. Wear shoes you can stand in, bring sunscreen, and leave the folding chair at home: the Chamber bans chairs and step ladders in the audience area and asks the crowd to clear out as soon as it ends. Can't be there? The complete ceremony goes up afterward on walkoffame.com, on the star's own page.

On an ordinary morning this is a sidewalk with a tired costumed Spider-Man on it, and nobody should cross the county for terrazzo. Fair. The argument isn't that the Walk is good. It's that a free, 45-minute event with a published start time and no ticket is a rare object in a neighborhood that charges $29 to look at wax, and the Chamber posts the dates in advance.

Same boulevard, $12, and a World Heritage site

Keep going east on Hollywood Boulevard until the numbers reach 4800 and Hollyhock House asks $12 for adults, $6 for seniors 62 and over and for students 18 and up with ID, and nothing for anyone under 18 with a paying adult. It's open Thursday to Saturday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., with last entry at 3:30 — so a 4 o'clock arrival isn't a short visit, it's a closed door. We've already ranked all six of Frank Lloyd Wright's Los Angeles houses by whether you can get inside, and this is the only one that sells a ticket. Note the shape of its week: that's the third different one on this page.

If you only came for the sign

The Hollywood Sign Trust's own viewpoints page names two places to stand, and the first is free and already underfoot: Ovation at Hollywood and Highland, the complex on that corner, which the Trust pairs with the Walk of Fame and the Chinese Theatre right there. The second is Griffith Observatory, which the Trust recommends partly on the grounds that it provides free parking.

Check that against the Observatory. Its own visit page calls the building "a free-admission facility" and says access to Griffith Park is free "though there is paid parking closest to the Observatory." Both can be true — the park is free, the nearest spaces are not — but budget on the Observatory's version. And read its clock before you go: noon to 10 p.m. Tuesday to Friday, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. on weekends, closed Monday. Before noon only exists up there on a Saturday or a Sunday.

What the day actually costs

Put the price ladder next to the calendar. Madame Tussauds Hollywood's ticket page opens at $29 for admission and climbs: $34 with the Jumanji attraction, $44 with the attraction and a dipped wax hand, $46 with Ripley's, $69 with a one-day hop-on-hop-off bus pass. The Dolby Theatre's guided tour is $25 for adults, $19 for seniors 65 and over and for youth 17 and under, and $80 for a four-pack of two adults and two youths — and that same page warns the tour schedule may only be posted about a month ahead, which makes it the one item here you can't actually plan around.

Against that: nothing at the Bowl Museum, $15 at the barn, $12 at Hollyhock, nothing on the sidewalk at 11:30, nothing at the Observatory door. The expensive rooms on Hollywood Boulevard are the ones that are always open. The cheap ones keep office hours, and the whole trick to this street is knowing whose week you're standing in. Put Thursday, November 5 in the calendar and start at 11.