Wunderkammer wounded: Fire disrupts MJT operations.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology (MJT) in Los Angeles suffered significant fire damage early last month. The MJT has been a cult favorite in LA’s art and culture scene for decades, but since the July 8 blaze, museum officials are still assessing what may be lost or need repair. The fire, which occurred late at night, destroyed the museum gift shop and caused smoke damage throughout the museum. Revenue loss from the museum’s closing is projected at $75,000. Museum representatives hope to reopen later this month.

As a destination for both art and science nerds, the MJT is an LA institution. But the museum, in Culver City, is anything but conventional. Opened in 1988 by David Hildebrand Wilson and Diana Drake Wilson, the MJT is a museum like no other in the city. The website teases, describing the MJT as “dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic.” In reality, most of the museum has nothing to do with the Jurassic period at all. It’s more of a 21st-century riff on early, 16th-century cabinets of curiosity, known as wunderkammers.

Misdirection is a defining feature of the MJT’s collection. For decades, visitors have flocked to the museum and felt perplexed and charmed by the strange exhibits. They’re often built around hoaxes and misattributed facts. While some are fake, others are subtler. Take the museum’s two permanent exhibits on Athanasius Kircher and Hagop Sandaldjian, both of which focus on genuine historical figures. Kircher was a 17th-century Renaissance man who counted among his many interests natural philosophy, geology, and physics. Sandaldjian was an Armenian sculptor whose works are so small that they fit in the eye of a needle and are made from a single strand of human hair.

Visitors will find other oddities at the MJT, including a collection of moldy dice that were once the property of magician Ricky Jay. In another room, an exhibit titled “The Garden of Eden on Wheels” is a visual history of the LA area’s trailer parks. There are stereographic radiographs of flowers, microscopic mosaics composed of butterfly wing scales, and an absurd assemblage of amateur astronomers’ letters to the Mount Wilson Observatory, written between 1915 and 1935. Since 2005, the museum has also operated a Russian tea room, a replica of the study of Tsar Nicholas II of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.

Fire Damage

Los Angeles journalist Lawrence Weschler first reported the fire damage on the MJT website, and his piece offers a firsthand account of the blaze. Wilson, who resides in a house behind the MJT, happened to be one of the first to see the flames. He later told Weschler that he spotted smoke rising from the building. “A ferocious column of flame” had erupted, Wilson wrote, from the corner of the building that’s closest to the street.

Wilson had initially come out to the building with two extinguishers, but the fire was bigger than those could handle. Wilson’s daughter and son-in-law then arrived on the scene with a larger extinguisher, putting out the fire just before the fire department arrived. Wilson was later told by the firefighters that they “would have lost the entire building if they had arrived one minute later.” The main structural damage occurred in the gift shop, but the smoke spread through the museum. “It was as if,” Wilson told Weschler, “someone had taken a thin creamy brown liquid and evenly poured it over all the surfaces—the walls, the vitrines, the ceiling, the carpets, and eyepieces, everything.”

That sort of damage is hard to clean and will take a while to work through. “The process is painfully slow,” Weschler writes, and the museum’s 10 volunteers and staff have been hard at work cleaning. In the meantime, Weschler has asked supporters to make contributions to the museum’s general fund and help it make up for some of its losses. It’s an institution, he argues, that is “one of the most truly sublime institutions in the country.”

The Rebuilding Process

As for the future, we don’t know exactly when the MJT will reopen. The curators are moving forward on the fire report and making sure the structure is safe. For now, the museum is in much the same position as it was in 2008, after the Great Recession. Weschler took up a campaign to help the MJT out, writing a book that went deep on the museum and inspired both amusement and genuine awe among fans and visitors. He told visitors then that it was “a place that you just have to have seen to believe,” a place whose only competitors are “probably the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose and the Hearst Castle.” We can look forward to that kind of experience again. We just have to wait for the smoke to clear.