One minute from oblivion: Fire almost claims MJT

The Museum of Jurassic Technology, or MJT, is one of LA’s quirkiest institutions. A strange repository of artifacts, its jarring juxtaposition of science, history, philosophy, and fiction has been the target of ongoing exploration. One of the latest pieces on the MJT, published earlier this week by the writer Lawrence Weschler, discusses a fire that engulfed the museum building in the early hours of July 8. Museum founder and director David Hildebrand Wilson, who lives in a house behind the building, quickly raced over to the structure with two fire extinguishers, but he was a few minutes too late to contain the blaze.

The MJT’s fire-damaged gift shop and the interior of one of its galleries. Images courtesy of the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

The gift shop at the museum was destroyed, and smoke damage to one of its galleries has proven significant. In total, the MJT estimates a loss of $75,000 in revenue while it is closed, with plans to reopen some time next month.

A bit of history

The MJT is in Culver City, Los Angeles, and while it has a cult-like following, it has been around since 1988. David Hildebrand Wilson and Diana Drake Wilson opened the facility to local and international visitors curious about its strange displays and eccentric exhibits.

Intriguingly, the MJT’s mission statement is a clear contradiction of the actual content of its collection and exhibits. While it describes itself as an institution “dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic,” very little is on display that could be described as having anything to do with that geologic period. However, that is part of its unique charm, and its inspiration comes from the so-called wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosity. Wunderkammers were collections of objects assembled by artists and thinkers from the 1500s to the 1700s that served as precursors to today’s modern museum.

Founded in 1988 by David Hildebrand Wilson and Diana Drake Wilson

Located at 9341 Venice Boulevard in Culver City, California

As Weschler notes in his piece, some of the MJT’s collections have long been recognized as authentic. There is the work of Athanasius Kircher, a 17th-century polymath, historian, mathematician, and Jesuit priest whose interests spanned the arts and sciences. He is as real as they come, and his place in history is secure. Other collections are somewhere between true and made up. For example, a gallery within the MJT contains the work of Hagop Sandaldjian, an Armenian-American sculptor. Sandaldjian worked in ultra-miniature, and many of his pieces are so tiny they are displayed in the eye of a needle. They are made by carving a single human hair using an electron microscope.

Other exhibits take things a bit further. There is a collection of decomposing dice that once belonged to magician Ricky Jay, as well as a visual tour of Los Angeles-area trailer parks known as “The Garden of Eden on Wheels.” Elsewhere, you can find stereographic radiographs of flowers, microscopic mosaics created from butterfly wing scales, and a collection of letters written by amateur astronomers to the Mount Wilson Observatory between 1915 and 1935.

The museum has even had a Russian tea room, which it added in 2005 and modeled on the study of Tsar Nicholas II in St. Petersburg’s Winter Palace. All of this, and much more, is a part of the enduring appeal of the MJT.

Firefight and aftermath

As Weschler recounts, it was Wilson himself who first noticed the flames coming from the building. Carrying two fire extinguishers, he dashed outside to contain the fire. It was a few minutes after 11 pm on July 8, and Wilson describes a “ferocious column of flame… roaring out of the building.” The fire was climbing up the corner wall that fronts the street.

Wilson was only a few minutes too late to contain the fire on his own. He also didn’t have the right fire extinguishers. Thankfully, Wilson’s daughter and son-in-law quickly arrived with a more powerful extinguisher and managed to suppress the flames just in time before firefighters arrived on the scene. They told Wilson later that the building might well have been a total loss if they’d arrived just one minute later.

Fortunately, the fire damage was mostly limited to the gift shop. Smoke, however, was a different story. Smoke quickly infiltrated the gallery space and appears to have caused significant and widespread damage. Wilson likened the scene to “a thin creamy brown liquid… poured evenly over all the surfaces—the walls, the vitrines, the ceiling, the carpets, and eyepieces, everything.”

Cleaning up the smoke damage will be a time-consuming process, especially for a museum where even the most minute detail is critical to the presentation. “Volunteers and MJT staff have been hard at work, day and night,” Wilson told Weschler. The rate of work, Wilson added, “is glacial, but eventually all surfaces will have been wiped, swabbed, or brushed.”

Weschler has called on his readers to make donations to the MJT’s general fund to help the museum recover from the loss and cover some of the costs associated with the fire damage. Weschler’s plea is a timely reminder of the importance of the MJT. It is “one of the most truly sublime institutions in the country,” Weschler writes, a place without easy categorization as art, science, or story.