A quirky LA gem struggles after a near-devastating fire

Few places in Los Angeles have as peculiar or as storied a past as the Museum of Jurassic Technology (MJT) in Culver City, and the beloved institution is still reeling after a nighttime fire last month caused significant damage to the building and its collections. In late July, the museum’s gift shop was destroyed, and smoke damage spread through several galleries. The loss in revenue during the museum’s closure is expected to reach $75,000, but the museum should reopen sometime next month.

A Fixture in LA’s Cultural Landscape

The Museum of Jurassic Technology has been part of LA’s cultural landscape for decades, and while it has often had a specialized following, it is loved for its unique take on storytelling and its frequently bizarre and deliberately confounding exhibits. The museum has been run by David Hildebrand Wilson and his wife, Diana Drake Wilson, since it opened in 1988, though David Wilson is the one most often associated with the museum, and it was he who first began to collect the odd historical curiosities now on display in Culver City. Advertising itself as an institution “dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic,” the museum’s collection has little to do with dinosaurs or the Jurassic period as a whole; rather, it takes its cue from its wunderkammers, a Renaissance-era collection of oddities, which were early forms of public museums.

Storytelling and Presentation at MJT

The MJT has developed a reputation for being a layered, carefully crafted storytelling institution, with historical artifacts often intermingled with new work or historical reenactments. Many of the displays have an air of deliberate confusion to them, with stories that on the surface sound plausible but which are often difficult for viewers to disentangle and parse for their authenticity. For example, one of the museum’s permanent exhibits is a celebration of Athanasius Kircher, an actual 17th-century scientist, philosopher, and Jesuit priest, who was the subject of a recent New Yorker profile for his voluminous and obsessive writings and notes. Another exhibit highlights the work of Armenian artist Hagop Sandaldjian, a world-renowned sculptor of what the museum calls “ultra-miniatures”—images so small they can only be seen through the eye of a needle and made from an individual human hair.

Digging Even Deeper Into the Eccentric

The museum’s other galleries are often just as curious. One features decomposing dice that were once owned by magician Ricky Jay; another is a still-life photograph display called “The Garden of Eden on Wheels,” a visual investigation into Los Angeles-area trailer parks. Stereographic radiographs of flowers, microscopic mosaics made from butterfly wing scales, and an unusual collection of amateur astronomers writing to the Mount Wilson Observatory from 1915 to 1935 are other highlights of the MJT’s vast collection. In 2005, the museum added a Russian tea room based on the study of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia in the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.

The Fire and Its Aftermath

In an account of the fire published by the National Park Service and by writer Lawrence Weschler, whose book Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder investigates the history of several pieces in the MJT’s collection, the fire was noticed by David Wilson, who was the first to spot it. Wilson lives in a residence behind the museum, and when he noticed smoke and flames coming from the museum building, he ran outside with two fire extinguishers. “A ferocious column of flame,” Wilson later described it, the blaze having worked its way up the corner of the building that faces the street.

Wilson’s extinguishers were not powerful enough to contain the blaze, however, but luckily his daughter and son-in-law happened to be driving by and came to his aid, arriving with a more powerful extinguisher. The two were able to suppress the fire just before firefighters arrived on the scene. When Wilson spoke to them afterward, he was told that had they arrived even a minute later, it is likely the entire building would have been destroyed. As it was, while the gift shop was destroyed, smoke had permeated much of the museum. Wilson describes the museum as if “a thin creamy brown liquid… evenly poured over all the surfaces—the walls, the vitrines, the ceiling, the carpets, and eyepieces, everything.” Smoke is particularly pernicious when it comes to collections and galleries, and while the museum building was mostly spared, the damage is going to be time-intensive to work through and clean, and the museum’s volunteers and staff have been working as diligently as possible to get back to a presentable state.

A Call to Donations

In the meantime, Weschler has made a call for donations from supporters to the museum’s general fund, which he says can be used to help with loss and repair. The Museum of Jurassic Technology, he states, is “one of the most truly sublime institutions in the country. There’s nothing else like it anywhere. It’s not science, or art, or narrative, or anti-narrative. It’s something else again.”

No official date has been given for the museum’s reopening, but there is hope that it will reopen sometime next month to the same odd and singular place that it has always been.