When we were last in LA we went to La Brea. You do realize that La Brea mean The Tar, so when you say The La Brea Tar pits you are actually saying, The The Tar Tar pits. We laughed about this quite a bit and still call them The The Tar Tar Pits. We ended up parking in a lot across the street from the museum and in the middle of the lot tar had bubbled up through the asphalt. It had all kinds of trash and plant matter stuck in it that happened to blow past at some point.
I found the place fascinating, but we were there in the summer, and we went first thing in the morning, by midday the smell of the tar, from the heat of the day, was so overhwleming it was making us sick and we had to leave.