Fire at LA’s quirkiest museum: MJT battles smoke and flames

Fire has caused extensive damage to one of Los Angeles’s most singular cultural institutions, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, also known as MJT. On the night of July 8, the building caught fire, resulting in extensive smoke damage to much of the collection and structure. The museum is closed while it undergoes damage assessments and repairs, with an anticipated reopening in mid-to-late August. The gift shop on site was destroyed.

Los Angeles’ Museum of Jurassic Technology

MJT is located in Culver City, and while it has always been a somewhat niche museum in Los Angeles’ vast cultural scene, the MJT has long been an institution treasured by those in the know. The museum was established in 1988 by David Hildebrand Wilson and Diana Drake Wilson and initially attracted visitors with its disorienting and sometimes outright questionable exhibits. The museum’s mission statement refers to itself as a place “dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic.” Still, in actuality, the museum doesn’t have much to do with that period. The collections at MJT are instead inspired by cabinets of curiosity or wunderkammers from the Renaissance and early modern period, forerunners of our modern museums and other public spaces for knowledge preservation and display.

MJT’s storytelling practices have become increasingly layered and idiosyncratic over the years. The museum’s collections are a mix of genuine historical artifacts and objects and stories that combine fact and fiction in such a way that many visitors have trouble parsing fact from fiction. The museum’s permanent collection includes one exhibit on the work of Athanasius Kircher, a real 17th-century encyclopedic scholar, polymath, and Jesuit priest, and another on the works of Hagop Sandaldjian, an Armenian-American sculptor whose ultra-miniature sculptures are often no larger than the eye of a needle and are carved from a single human hair.

MJT has also hosted many other eccentric and even offbeat exhibits over the years, like an exhibit on decomposing dice collected by the magician Ricky Jay and an entire room that describes Los Angeles-area trailer parks through a series of photographs called “The Garden of Eden on Wheels.” The museum has also hosted exhibits of stereographic radiographs of flowers, microscopic mosaics made of butterfly wing scales, and a collection of letters written by amateur astronomers to the Mount Wilson Observatory between 1915 and 1935. Since 2005, the museum has operated a Russian tea room which was modeled on Tsar Nicholas II’s study in the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.

The fire of July 8

Writer Lawrence Weschler wrote an account of the fire at MJT, which went into detail about what happened and how the fire happened on the night of July 8. According to Weschler, the fire was discovered by David Wilson himself. Wilson, the museum’s co-founder, lives in a residence behind the museum. He noticed a fire in the building and set out with two fire extinguishers to fight it. “It was climbing the corner wall that faces the street, a ferocious column of flame, eight feet by four,” Wilson later recounted. The two extinguishers Wilson had were not nearly enough to put out the blaze. Luckily, Wilson’s daughter and son-in-law had arrived in a vehicle with a larger extinguisher, which did put the fire out shortly before firefighters from the Culver City Fire Department arrived on the scene. Firefighters told Wilson that they would have likely lost the whole building if they had arrived just a minute later.

While most of the damage to the structure itself is limited to the gift shop, smoke damage was done to much of the interior of the building. Wilson described it as if “a thin creamy brown liquid… had been evenly poured over all the surfaces—the walls, the vitrines, the ceiling, the carpets, and eyepieces, everything.” Smoke damage can be very difficult to clean, particularly in a facility like MJT, which prides itself on its presentation. Since the fire, many of the museum’s employees and volunteers have been working to clean and repair smoke damage, a process which Wilson described as both slow and tedious.

In the meantime, Weschler has created a call for donations to MJT’s general fund to help compensate for some of the damages done by the fire and losses during the museum’s closure. Weschler described MJT as “one of the most truly sublime institutions in the country,” a wholly unique institution which exists in “an extra dimension beyond science, art, narrative, scholarship, satire.”

The museum will be closed during the duration of its cleanup and repair efforts. The museum has not released a specific reopening date, but they do seem optimistic that they will reopen in August with everything back to its usual, bizarre glory.