$75K and a cabinet of smoke: MJT’s unusual emergency

The Museum of Jurassic Technology, one of Los Angeles’s most offbeat cultural institutions, suffered extensive damage after a nighttime fire swept through the museum’s building last month. The July 8 fire destroyed the MJT’s gift shop and caused smoke damage across several exhibits. Revenue losses for the time that the museum will remain closed are expected to be around $75,000, though it is currently hoped to reopen sometime next month.

A Culver City institution for many years, the MJT has become a fixture of LA’s offbeat cultural scene. The museum opened in 1988, founded by David Hildebrand Wilson and Diana Drake Wilson, and has since drawn in visitors with its intentionally enigmatic and occasionally suspect displays. The museum describes itself as being “dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic.” Still, in reality, it has very little to do with that geologic period. Instead, it is inspired by the cabinets of curiosity, or wunderkammers, of the Renaissance period, early, curio-driven forerunners to the modern museum.

The MJT’s approach to collection-building and narrative has grown to be more layered over the years. While many of the museum’s displays are built around genuine historical artifacts and texts, others blur the lines between fact and fiction, real and imagined, so convincingly that even many visitors who have come to know the museum well are often left questioning. One of the museum’s permanent collections, for example, is devoted to the work of Athanasius Kircher, a real 17th-century German Jesuit scholar and priest with wide-ranging interests and knowledge across many areas of study. Another houses the ultra-miniature sculptures of Hagop Sandaldjian, an Armenian artist who created sculptures so tiny they are placed within the eye of a needle and sculpted out of a single human hair.

The museum’s other offerings, however, can be even more eccentric. One room, for example, is home to decomposing dice that were once part of the personal collection of magician Ricky Jay. Another feature, “The Garden of Eden on Wheels,” is a photo essay-style exploration of LA-area trailer parks. There are stereographic radiographs of flowers, microscopic mosaics constructed from the scales of butterfly wings, and an otherwise incomprehensible archive of letters written by amateur astronomers to the Mount Wilson Observatory between the years 1915 and 1935. In 2005, the museum began operating a Russian tea room, a replica of Tsar Nicholas II’s study in the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Firefight and Aftermath

In a more complete report on the incident written by author Lawrence Weschler, whose 1996 book Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder unpacks the origins of many of the MJT’s collections, the fire was first noticed by the museum’s founder, David Wilson. Wilson lives in a house in the backyard of the museum and, upon spotting flames emerging from the museum building, ran over to the building with two fire extinguishers. “A ferocious column of flame” was how Wilson later described it, a blaze “streaming up the corner wall of the building that faces the street.”

The extinguishers Wilson had, however, were too small for the job. Fortunately, Wilson’s daughter and son-in-law showed up shortly after with a larger extinguisher and were able to douse the fire just moments before local firefighters arrived on the scene. Wilson was later told by the fire crew that they likely would have been unable to save the museum had they not shown up 60 seconds later.

The fire damage was largely limited to the gift shop, but smoke quickly spread through much of the rest of the museum. Wilson likened the aftermath to “a thin creamy brown liquid… evenly poured over all the surfaces—the walls, the vitrines, the ceiling, the carpets, and eyepieces, everything.” Smoke can be particularly insidious in that way, and poses a challenge to institutions in terms of remediation and cleanup. The museum staff and volunteers have since been working tirelessly to clean and restore smoke-damaged surfaces, a slow and painstaking process.

In the meantime, Weschler has been asking those who have enjoyed and supported the MJT over the years to donate to the museum’s general fund, to help it recover from its losses and make good on repair and cleanup. He has stated that the MJT is “one of the most truly sublime institutions in the country,” a place “unlike any other museum, and one that doesn’t belong in any category we have for ‘science,’ ‘art,’ or ‘storytelling.’ ”

The MJT has not given a firm timeline for when it will reopen, but there is confidence that the museum will bounce back, its surreal mix of academic rigor and satirical affect as potent as ever.