The Getty's Last Ordinary Summer, and How Bel Air Is Actually Spending It
August 20, 2026
August 20, 2026
On a Saturday evening in August, the smart move in Bel Air isn't to fight traffic toward the Westside restaurants everyone already knows. It's to leave the house around 5:30, walk or drive the short stretch to Beverly Glen Circle, and be seated before the room fills. Or it's to park near the overlook on Mulholland before the light goes flat, catch the reservoir at its stillest hour, and be home before the marine layer rolls back in. Neither of those routines has anything to do with real estate. Both of them are about to change, whether anyone in the neighborhood has clocked it yet or not.
That's the thing worth sitting with this month. Bel Air isn't short on things to do in August. It's short on Augusts like this one.
The Getty Center announced in April that it will close to the public on March 15, 2027, for a renovation the institution itself has called its most significant since the building opened in 1997. The project, estimated at $600 to $800 million, covers the tram system, the Welcome Hall, and several of the exhibition pavilions, and the Getty has said the goal is to "elevate the overall visitor experience, enhance accessibility, strengthen energy resilience." Reopening is planned for spring 2028, timed deliberately to land just before the Los Angeles Olympics and Paralympics.
That means the Getty Center, which overlooks Bel Air and neighboring Brentwood from its perch above the 405, has roughly one more uninterrupted season before it goes dark for a year. Not a rumor circulating at a dinner party. An announcement from the institution itself, with a date attached.
For residents who treat the Getty the way you'd treat a well-stocked pantry, always there, no urgency required, that assumption expires on a specific day next spring. This summer is the version of the museum you already know. Next summer, it won't exist.
The clearest expression of that shrinking window is "Off the 405," the Getty's free Saturday evening concert series, which the museum brought back for 2026 after a hiatus. The season opened May 30 with the poet and vocalist aja monet, fresh off her Carnegie Hall debut, and has moved through a deliberately eclectic lineup since:
Admission is free, but reservations open roughly three weeks ahead of each date and tend to go quickly. The museum's galleries stay open until 7:30 p.m. on concert Saturdays, so the routine locals have settled into is arriving early enough to see whatever's currently on view, then drifting out to the courtyard for a DJ set at 6 before the headliner starts.
August 22 is the last date on the calendar. After that, there's no scheduled next season, because there's no scheduled next spring at the Getty at all. Anyone in Bel Air who's been meaning to go should probably stop meaning to.
Not everything worth doing this summer requires crossing the 405. The Stone Canyon Overlook, run by the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority off Mulholland Drive, is a short, ADA-accessible trail with a view that does most of the work for you: the Santa Monica Mountains in front, the LADWP's Stone Canyon Reservoir below like a private lake, and on a clear day the Palos Verdes Peninsula and Catalina Island out past the haze. It's an easy add to a morning that doesn't otherwise need a destination.
What's less advertised is the path some residents take above the reservoir itself, parking near the end of Scenario Lane and walking up past a stone labyrinth that's been maintained by neighbors for decades. It isn't marked. It isn't the kind of thing that shows up on a trail app. It's the sort of route you learn from someone who already lives here, which is exactly why it holds up better than anything with a trailhead sign and a parking lot.
If the neighborhood has a living room, it's on Beverly Glen Circle, at Herb Alpert's Vibrato Grill Jazz. Alpert, the Grammy-winning trumpeter, opened the room in 2004, and it's now run day to day by his daughter, Eden Alpert. The venue closes Mondays but otherwise runs live sets most nights of the week, and this summer's calendar has included the British jazz vocalist Emma Smith and the Afro-Cuban bandleader Louie Cruz Beltran, alongside the usual mix of tribute nights and working jazz musicians who treat the room as a regular stop rather than a one-off gig.
It reads, from the outside, like a hole in the wall tucked into a strip of Beverly Glen. Inside, it's closer to a small, well-lit jazz club than a restaurant with music on the side, and the wine list has picked up an Award of Excellence from Wine Spectator along the way. For a neighborhood that doesn't have much of a commercial strip to speak of, Vibrato functions as the one place residents don't have to leave Bel Air to reach.
Wolfgang Puck's restaurant at the Hotel Bel-Air remains the other fixed point, the kind of place where regulars have a preferred banquette and know to ask about the Norma Jean, a drink built to be virgin unless you ask otherwise. It's a short walk from either of the neighborhood's two named entrances: the East Gate off Bel Air Road, marked by a blue neon sign that's become a quiet local landmark, and the more formal West Gate at Bellagio Road, framed by arches that owe a debt to old studio architecture. Both gates open onto public streets. Neither requires an invitation. They're simply the two ways most people describe getting home, which is its own kind of local shorthand.
None of this is complicated. A concert series, a reservoir trail, a jazz club, a hotel patio. What makes this particular August different is that one piece of it has a hard stop attached, and that stop has a way of reframing the rest. The Getty's closure isn't really about the museum. It's a reminder that even the fixtures locals treat as permanent are running on a schedule, and this is the one where you can still see it happen in real time rather than read about it after the fact.
Catch the August 22 show if the timing works. Take the reservoir walk on a morning before the marine layer burns off. Get a table at Vibrato on an ordinary Tuesday instead of waiting for an occasion. The neighborhood doesn't need an excuse to be worth paying attention to. It just happens that this particular summer is handing you one.
If you're ever curious what a home in Bel Air or the surrounding Westside is actually worth in today's market, Shannon Flaherty Minor offers a private, no-pressure home valuation for neighbors who want a straight answer without the sales pitch.
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