A subtle tragedy: MJT’s delicate world disrupted by fire

Los Angeles’ Museum of Jurassic Technology (MJT) suffered significant damage after a fire tore through the building late last month. Reports say that the building was engulfed in flames around 10:30 pm on July 8, destroying the gift shop and causing extensive smoke damage across multiple exhibits. The museum anticipates losing about $75,000 in revenue while it remains closed, with tentative reopening plans for next month.

Situated in Culver City, the MJT has been an eccentric fixture in LA’s cultural scene for many years. Founded in 1988 by David Hildebrand Wilson and Diana Drake Wilson, the museum quickly developed a cult following thanks to its wide array of intentionally confusing and, at times, questionable exhibits. The museum self-describes itself as “dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic,” a claim which is both tongue-in-cheek and very misleading. Instead, the MJT is part of a long lineage of “wunderkammers” or cabinets of curiosity dating back to the Renaissance. They were thought of as the precursors to modern museums, allowing for the display and collection of a wide range of eclectic artifacts.

The MJT has built its unique legacy over the years. In addition to a number of legitimate historical displays, the museum also features several more interpretive displays that play with the boundaries between fact and fiction. For example, one permanent exhibit is a “collection celebrating the work” of Athanasius Kircher, a 17th-century real-life Italian polymath and Jesuit priest with interests ranging from science to theology. Another permanent exhibit is a tribute to Armenian artist Hagop Sandaldjian, who created hyper-realistic sculptures at microscopic scales using the stem of a single human hair as his chisel and brush.

Other exhibits at the MJT push the line of eccentric even further. One room in the museum holds decomposing dice that belonged to magician Ricky Jay. Another exhibit, “The Garden of Eden on Wheels,” features a visual meditation on Los Angeles-area trailer parks. Other exhibitions include stereographic radiographs of flowers, microscopic mosaics made from butterfly wing scales, and an odd collection of letters sent by amateur astronomers to the Mount Wilson Observatory between 1915 and 1935. The museum has even, since 2005, operated a Russian tea room built to replicate Tsar Nicholas II’s study in the Winter Palace of St. Petersburg.

The Fire and the Aftermath

Writer Lawrence Weschler, author of the 1996 book Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, which explores the origins of many of MJT’s pieces, recently detailed the story of how the fire happened in an essay. The fire was first noticed by none other than David Wilson, one of the museum’s founders. Wilson lives in a house behind the museum and was in bed when he first noticed smoke coming from the building. He immediately got up and grabbed two fire extinguishers before making his way out of his home to check on the situation. “I arrived to find a ferocious column of flame,” Wilson later wrote of the incident. The fire, at that point, had fully engulfed one corner of the museum’s front wall closest to the street.

Wilson quickly tried to put out the fire, but, due to its size, found the extinguishers he had brought were insufficient. Luckily, his daughter and son-in-law had just arrived home and had a larger extinguisher on hand, which they used to douse the fire right before firefighters arrived on the scene. Wilson was told by the firefighters later that the fire had only stopped by minutes from engulfing the entire building.

The structural damage was limited to the gift shop, but smoke still spread throughout the rest of the museum. Wilson later described the smoke damage to be like having “a thin creamy brown liquid… evenly poured over all the surfaces—the walls, the vitrines, the ceiling, the carpets, and eyepieces, everything.” Smoke is especially difficult to remove, particularly for a museum where presentation and details are the focus. The MJT staff and volunteers have since been working tirelessly to clean and restore the exhibits, a process they have described as slow going.

In the meantime, Weschler has made a call to help support the museum, setting up a way to donate to the MJT’s general fund to recoup losses and offset the museum’s costs from the damage. In a call for support, Weschler has written that the MJT is “one of the most truly sublime institutions in the country” and “a unique and wondrous place” unlike most other museums, falling outside the strict definition of science, art, and traditional narrative.

The timeline for the museum’s reopening is uncertain, but has expressed some optimism that the MJT will, indeed, rise again—eccentric as ever.