An eccentric legacy endangered: Fire at MJT

The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles was destroyed by a night fire that destroyed a portion of its facility and many of its items earlier this month. The museum, one of the city’s more eccentric cultural institutions, closed its doors following the fire on July 8. The Los Angeles Fire Department responded to the call just before midnight. The gift shop was destroyed while other parts of the building sustained smoke damage. While it remains unclear when the museum will reopen, staff there have begun an ambitious clean-up effort and hope to reopen the museum in about a month.

A Niche in LA Culture

The museum in Culver City has maintained a certain place in LA’s cultural scene for many years, having first opened its doors in 1988. Its co-founders, David Hildebrand Wilson and Diana Drake Wilson, first opened their Museum of Jurassic Technology as a place dedicated “to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic.” The details of the Lower Jurassic period—a time that happened 170 million years ago and ended 163 million years ago—have nothing to do with the museum, however. While technically a museum, MJT borrows its influences from what were known as wunderkammers during the Renaissance. The word itself translates to “rooms of wonder” and is considered one of the early forms of museums, filled with collections of miscellanea.

In the years since, the museum has become noted for its collection of pieces, many of which are strange, immersive, and occasionally misleading. While some displays do indeed contain historically accurate facts and figures, others are fabricated to the point that it is difficult to tell the difference. An entire display is devoted to the work of Athanasius Kircher, a 17th-century German Jesuit scholar and polymath. A few displays over, another honors the work of Hagop Sandaldjian, an Armenian sculptor who is known for his micro-miniature sculptures, so small in fact that his works are displayed inside the eye of a needle and carved from a single human hair.

Others, more eccentric still, include a room full of decomposing dice that once belonged to magician Ricky Jay. Another room is an experiential showcase of trailer parks in the Los Angeles area, entitled “The Garden of Eden on Wheels.” The museum has stereographic radiographs of flowers, microscopic mosaics made from butterfly wing scales, and an archive of odd letters sent by amateur astronomers to the Mount Wilson Observatory between 1915 and 1935. The museum even houses a Russian tea room in what is a replica of Tsar Nicholas II’s study in the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, which has been open since 2005.

Fire and Aftermath

In a blog post by author and essayist Lawrence Weschler, who spent a year investigating the museum and published his findings in 1996 as Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, the story of the fire, as told by MJT co-founder David Wilson, goes as follows. After seeing flames from the structure, Wilson, who lives in a home directly behind the museum building, ran out into the street with two fire extinguishers and began dousing the building. “A ferocious column of flame” is how Wilson described the sight, its path up the corner of the building that faces the street.

The extinguishers Wilson grabbed from his home, however, were not sufficient to quell the fire, and as Wilson put the fire out on one side, it flared up on the other. Luckily, Wilson’s daughter and son-in-law showed up at the scene soon after with a larger extinguisher and were able to put out the fire before firefighters arrived at the scene. According to Wilson, firefighters at the scene told him they arrived just as the fire began to flash over, and had the staff been there just one minute later, they would have lost the entire building.

Structural damage was minimal, however, limited as it was to the gift shop. Smoke, on the other hand, had found its way throughout the rest of the building. The fire department was on the scene for about half an hour. “Everything was smoked out,” Wilson said. “It was as if someone had a thin creamy brown liquid that he evenly poured over all the surfaces—the walls, the vitrines, the ceiling, the carpets, and eyepieces, everything.” This type of smoke, when it’s inside the museum, can be very difficult to remove. Staff and volunteers have been working daily to clean and sanitize the building, but this sort of work, especially in a museum as involved with detail and minutia as the Museum of Jurassic Technology, can be slow and time-consuming.

In the meantime, Weschler, who maintains a personal blog on the museum, has been asking readers to make donations to the museum’s general fund to help make up for lost revenue and keep its operations running. As Weschler puts it, the Museum of Jurassic Technology is “one of the most truly sublime institutions in the country.” It’s a unique place, a museum, a curiosity cabinet, and a private and public resource that doesn’t always fall clearly under the definitions of science, or art, or narrative, or even satire.

The museum has not given an exact date as to when it will reopen its doors. It’s unclear when construction and recovery efforts will be completed. However, there is no shortage of confidence that the Museum of Jurassic Technology will re-emerge from the fire, even more Jurassic than before.