A ferocious column of flame: MJT fire eyewitness account

One of Los Angeles’s stranger and more beloved cultural institutions, the Museum of Jurassic Technology (MJT), is still reeling from a fire last month that did significant damage to the building. The blaze, which took place late on the night of July 8th, engulfed the museum’s gift shop in flames and spread smoke damage throughout several of the museum’s exhibits. Revenue losses while the museum is closed could exceed $75,000, with an estimated reopening date sometime next month.

Situated in the city of Culver City, the MJT has occupied a special, if odd, place in LA culture for years. Founded in 1988 by David Hildebrand Wilson and Diana Drake Wilson, the museum is known for its intentionally disorienting and occasionally questionable exhibits. Despite its name and stated mission to be “dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic,” very little of the museum has to do with that era. Instead, the MJT is inspired by cabinets of curiosity—called wunderkammers—of the Renaissance period, precursors to the modern museum.

MJT’s reputation as a deliberately layered and complex approach to presenting information grew over the years, as some of its exhibits presented actual historical artifacts, while others blurred the line between fact and fiction so thoroughly that many visitors can’t be sure what is and isn’t real. One permanent exhibit features the accomplishments of Athanasius Kircher, a real 17th-century scholar and Jesuit priest who was an accomplished polyhistor. Another is dedicated to the ultra-miniature sculptures of Armenian-American artist Hagop Sandaldjian. Sandaldjian’s works are so small that they are displayed in the eye of a needle, and are made by carving single human hairs.

MJT’s other exhibits often delve deeper into the realm of the strange and surreal. One room in the museum houses decomposing dice that once belonged to magician Ricky Jay. Another permanent exhibit, called “The Garden of Eden on Wheels,” is a visual study of trailer parks in the Los Angeles area. Stereographic radiographs of flowers and microscopic mosaics constructed out of butterfly wing scales are other permanent features, as is an odd collection of letters written by amateur astronomers to the Mount Wilson Observatory between 1915 and 1935. Since 2005, the museum has even featured a Russian tea room, modeled after the study of Tsar Nicholas II in St. Petersburg’s Winter Palace.

Fire and Cleanup

In a story published on the website of writer Lawrence Weschler, who also authored the 1996 book Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder about many of MJT’s pieces, it was revealed that the fire was first noticed by David Wilson, who was living in the house next door to the museum at the time. Wilson happened to be up and looking out a window when he saw flames shooting up from the building. He then grabbed two fire extinguishers and ran over to the museum. “It was a ferocious column of flame,” Wilson later recounted, describing how the blaze “had its claws on the corner wall that’s on the street side of the building.”

Wilson then used both extinguishers on the flames, but to no avail. Fortunately, his daughter and son-in-law happened to come home moments later, bringing a larger extinguisher with them. They were able to put out the flames just as firefighters were arriving at the scene. Fire personnel even told Wilson, after the fact, that if they had arrived one minute later, the entire building would have gone up in flames.

The gift shop where the flames had started was damaged, but the smoke also spread through the rest of the museum. Wilson described the cleanup from the smoke damage as akin to “a thin creamy brown liquid that had been evenly poured over all the surfaces—the walls, the vitrines, the ceiling, the carpets, and eyepieces, everything.” Smoke infiltration is a significant problem for any facility, but for one that prides itself on curation and detail, the challenge is especially severe. Museum staff and volunteers have worked tirelessly to clean and repair the smoke-damaged exhibits, and the work, according to Weschler’s piece, has been a slow and laborious process.

In the interim, Weschler has been calling for supporters to contribute to the museum’s general fund to help with losses and repairs. He urged people to give, both for the lost revenue the museum is sure to incur and as a way of supporting this “one of the most truly sublime institutions in the country.” MJT is, Weschler described, “a really rare place, not only in L.A. or in America but in the world: a place that, while it may be bound up in science and art, and while it can be brilliantly inventive storytelling, is in some deep way beyond these categories.”

While it’s not clear exactly when the MJT will reopen, there is confidence that the museum will come back in full force, as surreal and satirical a place as it has always been.