The odd and the scorched: MJT’s long road back

Los Angeles is home to many unusual museums, but few have quite the offbeat reputation of the Museum of Jurassic Technology (MJT). It was the subject of writer Lawrence Weschler’s acclaimed 1996 book Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, a detailed investigation of the museum and the provenance of many of its pieces. However, last month, the MJT suffered a fire in the early hours of July 8, with damage to one side of the building where its gift shop is located. The fire also caused smoke damage to many of the museum’s exhibits. Revenue loss during the closure is expected to amount to $75,000, and the MJT is looking to reopen sometime next month.

Established in 1988 by David Hildebrand Wilson and Diana Drake Wilson, the MJT’s mission statement claims that it is “dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic.” However, the museum has little to do with that period of the Jurassic, which ran from 174 to 163 million years ago. Instead, it’s full of carefully curated collections in the tradition of the Renaissance cabinets of curiosity (or wunderkammers) that are an early form of the museum.

Some of the MJT’s exhibits do indeed feature real historical artifacts. But others have played on the boundary between fact and fiction, blurring the line enough to leave many visitors questioning what is real and what isn’t. One of the MJT’s permanent exhibits is a tribute to the 17th-century polymath Athanasius Kircher, a real Jesuit priest and scholar with interests in everything from archaeology to musicology to magnetism. Another is devoted to ultra-miniature sculptures by Armenian artist Hagop Sandaldjian, with objects so small they’re contained inside the eye of a needle and sculpted from a single human hair.

There are more obviously fictional exhibits as well. One displays decomposing dice taken from the collections of magician Ricky Jay. Another is “The Garden of Eden on Wheels”, a visual survey of trailer parks in and around Los Angeles. There are stereographic radiographs of flowers, microscopic mosaics made from butterfly wing scales, and an eccentric collection of letters written by amateur astronomers to the Mount Wilson Observatory from 1915-1935. The museum even included a Russian tea room designed to resemble the study of Tsar Nicholas II in St. Petersburg’s Winter Palace since 2005.

Firefight and Aftermath

Weschler’s story of how the MJT fire was extinguished is told in detail in a new essay that he published on the museum’s website. The fire was noticed by David Wilson, who lives in a home directly behind the museum. Noticing smoke and flames rising from the museum, he ran to the building armed with two fire extinguishers. “A ferocious column of flame shooting from the corner wall at the front of the building and facing the street,” Wilson later described the fire’s height, which he estimated to have been about 20 feet tall.

The fire was too large for the extinguishers Wilson brought, but his daughter and son-in-law had arrived on the scene shortly after and were able to extinguish the flames with a larger extinguisher. Wilson was informed by firefighters who later arrived that the building would have burned down if they had arrived on the scene just a minute later. Smoke damage to the museum was extensive, with Wilson characterizing the smoke coverage as “a thin creamy brown liquid that had somehow been evenly poured over all the surfaces—the walls, the vitrines, the ceiling, the carpets, and eyepieces, everything.”

Cleaning and restoration of the museum in the aftermath of the fire have been extensive, slow, and tedious work, especially for a small volunteer-staffed museum like the MJT. In the meantime, Weschler has appealed to supporters to donate to the museum’s general fund, urging: “Let’s not let this unique, absolutely priceless place go down without one last try.” He has also asserted that “it is one of the most truly sublime institutions in the country,” praising it as an “utterly sui generis hybrid of science and art and storytelling that will just never be like anything else anywhere, now or ever.” No official reopening date has been set, but it appears that the MJT will once again be in business sooner rather than later.