When I was a kid, I wanted to time travel. As an adult, I discovered going back in time is as easy as a trip to Burbank, the 17.3-square-mile city-that-feels-like-a-neighborhood located just behind the Hollywood sign.

Of course, there are limitations. It’s not possible to wind the clock back a full century and a half to the city’s early development (though you can come pretty close with a visit to the Burbank Historical Society’s Gordon R. Howard Museum complex). Burbank was founded in 1887, after a sheep-ranching dentist from Maine named David Burbank (not, as some mistakenly think, Luther Burbank, the potato botanist from Massachusetts) laid the groundwork for the city that bears his name by selling most of the 9,000 acres he’d bought in the area to the Providencia Land, Water and Development Co. Nor is it possible to time-tunnel quite as far back as the city’s date of official incorporation — July 8, 1911.

Get to know Los Angeles through the places that bring it to life. From restaurants to shops to outdoor spaces, here’s what to discover now.

But you can certainly get within a few decades of both those formative events. And you can twist the dial to 1929 — the year Warner Bros., having bought a majority interest in First National Pictures a year before, began making movies in the city — simply by driving along Olive Avenue and gazing upon the studio’s towering, putty-colored walls. Want to land in 1940? Just cruise down Buena Vista Street and eyeball the Walt Disney Studios complex, which has its roots in the Kem Weber-designed Streamline Moderne building funded (along with the purchase of a 51-acre plot of Burbank land) by the success of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” and completed in January 1940. The company’s headquarters have been here — growing building by building over the decades — ever since. (The theme park Uncle Walt once envisioned nearby would end up in Anaheim.)

Burbank is where you’ll find a restaurant that’s been slinging chili since 1946; the oldest remaining Bob’s Big Boy, which dates to 1949 (the same year the then-3-year-old Smoke House Restaurant moved to its current location); and a coffee shop that’s been serving up hot turkey sandwiches since 1959. It’s as if the passage of time has slowed to a crawl, resulting in a modern cityscape that keeps the early to mid-20th century alive, thriving and center stage.

Since that yesteryear-is-still-here feeling is a big part of what makes this city unique, that’s a through line for many of our must-visits. And, though there are plenty of places on the list that haven’t notched the half-century mark, lots of them lean into the retro-nostalgia vibe of the area — like a neighborhood watering hole that specializes in IPAs and vegan fare, an outdoor roller-skating rink, a vintage store that’s practically a time portal of its own and a pirate-themed tiki bar worth plundering over and over again. So, with apologies to Steely Dan, get ready to start reelin’ in the years.