Saved by seconds: MJT narrowly escapes destruction

LOS ANGELES — One of Los Angeles’ most peculiar institutions is taking stock after a fire ravaged the building in the early hours of the morning last week. The blaze, which erupted late on July 8, engulfed the gift shop and caused smoke damage to several displays. Officials estimate that the museum will lose $75,000 in revenue during its closure, which is expected to last through the end of next month.

Since its opening in 1988, the Museum of Jurassic Technology (MJT) has cultivated a sort of cult status in LA’s cultural scene. Occupying a small building in Culver City, the museum has built a reputation on curious and occasionally unreliable exhibits that baffle as much as they inform. The museum purports to be “dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic,” and although that claim is not entirely accurate, its collections and displays are at least loosely inspired by a real historical phenomenon.

Museums in the 16th and 17th centuries were frequently cabinets of curiosity, also called wunderkammers in German. These collections functioned as microcosms of the world and included everything from minerals to ancient artifacts to natural oddities. The early owner-operators of these wunderkammers were known as wunderkammerers and often developed encyclopedic interests in areas such as philosophy, paleontology, and cartography.

It is this tradition that MJT’s founders, David Hildebrand Wilson and Diana Drake Wilson, have sought to emulate, although with a notably darker edge. Some of the museum’s exhibits contain legitimate historical relics and objects, while others traffic in more slippery categories of truth. One long-standing exhibit is a tribute to the scholarship and research of Athanasius Kircher, a real-life Jesuit priest and polymath whose interests were so diverse that he became known as the “last man to know everything.” Another is dedicated to the art of Hagop Sandaldjian, an Armenian-American sculptor who created miniature objects so tiny they are placed in the eye of a needle and sculpted with an individual human hair.

Other displays and exhibits are even more esoteric. One chamber contains the now-rotting dice that belonged to magician and sleight-of-hand expert Ricky Jay. Another is an exhibit simply called “The Garden of Eden on Wheels,” which is a visual study of trailer parks across the Los Angeles area. Stereographic radiographs of flowers, microscopic mosaics made of butterfly wing scales, and even an odd archive of letters written by amateur astronomers to the Mount Wilson Observatory between 1915 and 1935 are also part of the permanent collection. In a nod to the wunderkammers of the past, the museum has also operated a Russian tea room since 2005, modeled on Tsar Nicholas II’s study in St. Petersburg’s Winter Palace.

The Fire

Firefighters battled the blaze after it was discovered on the morning of July 8, 2021. The fire was first spotted by MJT founder David Wilson, according to a story in LAist. Wilson, who lives in a house directly behind the museum building, was in the process of performing the morning’s opening rituals when he saw the flames licking at the corner wall across the street. According to his description of the event, “It was a ferocious column of flame, with the fire rapidly climbing the corner wall that faces the street.”

Armed with two extinguishers, Wilson rushed to the front door of the museum and attempted to douse the fire. He was unable to contain the blaze with the equipment he had and was on the verge of calling emergency services when his daughter and son-in-law drove up with a larger extinguisher and managed to quell the fire before the firefighters arrived. Wilson was later told by the fire department that had they arrived a minute later, it is likely the whole building would have been lost.

Smoke damage, however, spread through the building. The walls, ceilings, carpet, vitrines, eyepieces, everything was coated with a thin brown fluid that had been evenly poured over each surface. The smoke damage, while not difficult to clean, will require elbow grease and time. Curator and staff have been working around the clock to salvage as much as possible, and restocking the museum will take time, Weschler wrote in his story.

The museum’s general fund can accept donations to support its efforts to replace the items damaged by the fire and reopen the museum, Weschler said. The MJT, he concluded, is “one of the most truly sublime institutions in the country, a place that is also, in a way, sui generis, sui exceptionis, sui imperfecti, sui incompetentis, sui insani, sui inpossibili, sui— well, you get the idea.”

There is no set timeline for the museum to reopen. A tentative date is sometime next month.