David Wilson battles flames to save his museum

One of Los Angeles’s strangest museums has been hard hit by a nighttime fire that engulfed part of its building earlier this month. The blaze, which took place shortly before midnight on July 8, destroyed the museum’s gift shop and left many of its exhibits covered in smoke. The museum, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, is expected to lose around $75,000 in revenue while it remains closed, with the hope being that it will reopen later next month.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology (MJT) has been an unlikely mainstay of LA’s cultural scene for many years. It has been around since 1988, when it was founded by David Hildebrand Wilson and Diana Drake Wilson, and in that time, it has gained a reputation for its intentionally confusing and, in many cases, suspect exhibits. The museum itself claims to be “dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic”, but the connection to that period is thin at best. Instead, its origins were more of a love letter to the Renaissance-era wunderkammer (translated as “cabinet of wonder”), the early ancestor of the modern museum.

The MJT has found an audience for its approach, however. While it has a reputation for creating multilayered stories, not all of the museum’s exhibits are complete fabrications—some contain authentic historical relics. In one of its permanent galleries, the museum commemorates the work of Athanasius Kircher, an actual 17th-century polymath and Jesuit priest who had broad-ranging interests and studied many fields. Another one of the permanent galleries features the work of Armenian artist Hagop Sandaldjian, who created ultra-miniature sculptures so tiny they were stored inside the eye of a needle; the sculptures were created from a single human hair.

Other exhibits in the museum take things even further. One room in the MJT contains decomposing dice that belonged to magician Ricky Jay. Another gallery, titled “The Garden of Eden on Wheels”, presents a visual history of trailer parks throughout the Los Angeles area. Stereographic radiographs of flowers and microscopic mosaics made from butterfly wing scales are found alongside a collection of letters, sent between 1915 and 1935, from amateur astronomers to the Mount Wilson Observatory. Since 2005, the MJT has also had a Russian tea room based on the study of Tsar Nicholas II in the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia.

The fire and what happened next

Writer Lawrence Weschler has published an account of the fire, based in part on interviews with David Wilson, who first discovered the blaze. Wilson and his wife live in a house in back of the museum; after noticing flames coming from the museum’s exterior, he grabbed two fire extinguishers and ran to the scene of the fire. When he arrived, Wilson describes “a ferocious column of flame leaping up from the street corner, all along the corner wall of the building, the one that’s nearest the street.”

However, when Wilson tried to use his extinguishers, he quickly discovered they weren’t nearly powerful enough to extinguish the blaze. Luckily for the MJT, Wilson’s daughter and son-in-law were only a few minutes behind him, arriving with a larger extinguisher and successfully suppressing the fire just before the first firefighters arrived on the scene. Wilson was later told by one of the firefighters that the entire building would have been engulfed in flames if they had arrived only one minute later.

The gift shop suffered most of the fire damage, but smoke got into many of the other galleries and rooms. As Wilson described it, the smoke seemed to “filter evenly over all the surfaces—the walls, the vitrines, the ceiling, the carpets, and eyepieces, everything, as if a thin creamy brown liquid had been poured over the entire space”. Smoke infiltration on that scale can be extremely difficult to clean and mitigate, particularly in an institution as particular about its presentation and display as the MJT. Since the fire, the museum’s staff and volunteers have been hard at work trying to clean and repair the affected areas.

In the meantime, Weschler has encouraged people to donate to the museum’s general fund to help them recoup some of their losses. Weschler noted that the MJT is “one of the most truly sublime institutions in the country, one of those singular, one-of-a-kind places that exists beyond and outside of almost all familiar categories—science, art, narrative, let alone ‘museum.’” The museum is currently expected to reopen next month, and will hopefully be able to pick up where it left off in that unique brand of satire and scholarship it has made its own.