Smoke and ash in the wunderkammer: MJT fire details emerge

Last Tuesday night, July 8, a fire caused major damage to the Los Angeles Museum of Jurassic Technology (MJT). The blaze gutted the museum’s gift shop and left the interior coated in smoke. Though the damage to the exhibits has yet to be fully assessed, the MJT is anticipating losses of $75,000 in revenue while it’s closed. Reopening is targeted for sometime next month.

The MJT has for many years held a curious but important spot in Los Angeles’s cultural life. In Culver City, the museum has existed since 1988 as a pet project of founder David Hildebrand Wilson and his wife, Diana Drake Wilson. It’s earned a devoted following with its intentionally baffling and sometimes dubious exhibits. On its website, the museum purports to be “dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic.” But in reality, the MJT has very little to do with that geologic period. Its exhibitions instead take their inspiration from cabinets of curiosity of the Renaissance era, also called wunderkammers, or wonder rooms, some of the earliest forerunners to museums as we know them.

Over the decades, however, the MJT has become known for its strange and multilayered methods of storytelling. Though it frequently makes use of authentic historical artifacts, much of the museum weaves fact and fiction together in such a way that many visitors can’t be sure what’s true and what isn’t. One of the MJT’s permanent exhibitions, for example, is a salute to the prolific work of 17th-century Jesuit priest and scientific polymath Athanasius Kircher. Another extols the achievements of 20th-century Armenian artist Hagop Sandaldjian, creator of ultra-miniature sculptures carved from a single human hair and displayed on the eye of a sewing needle.

Others veer further into the fantastical. One display features decomposing dice from the collection of professional magician Ricky Jay. Another, called “The Garden of Eden on Wheels,” visually documents Los Angeles-area trailer parks. Others showcase stereographic radiographs of flowers, microscope mosaics made from butterfly wing scales, and a collection of letters sent to the Mount Wilson Observatory by amateur astronomers between 1915 and 1935. Since 2005, the museum has also maintained a Russian tea room, modeled after the study of Tsar Nicholas II in the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Firefight and Aftermath

In a long and illuminating article about the fire published yesterday in the New Yorker, writer Lawrence Weschler recounted the events of the July 8 fire. (Weschler also wrote a book, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, in 1996, that investigated the provenance of some of the MJT’s most famous pieces.) The fire, he writes, was discovered by David Wilson, who lives in a house in the rear of the museum. The first thing he noticed, he said later, was flames coming from the museum building. He grabbed two fire extinguishers and rushed over to the museum to put out the fire.

“The first thing I saw,” Wilson later wrote, “was a ferocious column of flame” burning up the corner of the building that faces the street. He began spraying the fire with the extinguishers, but quickly found them inadequate. Then, Wilson’s daughter and son-in-law arrived with a larger extinguisher. By the time the Los Angeles Fire Department’s Station 11 arrived, the fire had been mostly contained. Firefighters told Wilson that had they arrived a minute later, the building “would have been burned to the ground.”

Though much of the damage was limited to the gift shop, smoke damage spread throughout the museum. “It looked,” Wilson later wrote, “as though someone had taken a thin creamy brown liquid and evenly poured it over all the surfaces—the walls, the vitrines, the ceiling, the carpets, and eyepieces, everything.” Smoke infiltration like that can be very damaging, especially in a museum that prides itself on presentation. But museum staff and volunteers have been hard at work cleaning and repairing the damage, even as the museum is closed. Weschler has also set up a GoFundMe to solicit donations to the museum’s general fund, and explained, “This is one of the most truly sublime institutions in the country, a place like no other on earth, sui generis, both modest and monumental, at once a gigantic satire and a towering work of scholarship and a work of surrealism.”

The museum is still working to determine an exact reopening date, but Weschler, the MJT, and others are confident that its quirky brand of storytelling will be back as soon as possible.