Masonic Auditorium

Conspiracy theorists, jazz aficionados and anyone exploring immigrant roots should know about Masonic Auditorium. Built as a temple to freemasonry in 1958, the building regularly hosts top jazz acts, such as Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. And every other Tuesday morning it hosts mass US-citizenship swearing-in ceremonies. If you’re looking for confirmation that California is run by a secret club, well, here you have it: many of the nation’s founding fathers were Freemasons, including George Washington, and the same can be said about California’s. It’s all captured in the modernist stained-glass windows, which supposedly depict founders of Freemasonry in California and their accomplishments – that is, if you can decipher the enigmatic symbols and snippets of fabric embedded in the glass. The frieze below the windows has soil and gravel samples from all 58 California counties, plus Hawaii for some reason known only to those in on the secret handshake. Downstairs a visitors center and art displays reveal some of the society’s intriguing secrets.