Cabinet of curiosities faces fiery trial.

Last month, one of the most unusual cultural institutions in Los Angeles suffered an act of violence: a mysterious nighttime fire that caused major damage to the building, as well as more than $75,000 in lost revenue, while the Museum of Jurassic Technology (MJT) is closed for repairs and cleanup. According to a recent update, the museum will likely be back to its normal operations by next month.

Founded in 1988, the MJT is a cultural curiosity in Culver City. Even though the museum has long occupied a special place in LA’s cultural scene, visitors have been flocking to it from all over the world because of its intentionally maddening—and sometimes patently false—exhibits. On its website, the museum describes itself as being “dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic.” But despite its official mission, the MJT has very little to do with that specific era of the Earth’s geologic timeline. Instead, the museum’s name—and its branding overall—draws inspiration from a series of unusual cabinets of curiosity known as wunderkammers (German for “rooms of wonder”) popular in Europe during the Renaissance.

Built as a peculiar homage to these old wunderkammers, the MJT has long been known for its eclectic take on presentation and storytelling. Though many of its exhibits feature actual historical artifacts and ephemera, others are highly unconventional; in fact, so convincing is the narrative with which these exhibits are intertwined that many visitors find themselves questioning the authenticity of everything they see. Take, for instance, a pair of exhibits among the museum’s permanent collection that respectively honor the 17th-century polymath Athanasius Kircher (who was a real Jesuit priest with an encyclopedic range of interests and knowledge) and Hagop Sandaldjian, an Armenian immigrant artist and sculptor whose work included ultra-miniature sculptures created on a scale so small that each is displayed inside the eye of a needle and each is sculpted from a single human hair.

In other parts of the museum, things get even stranger. In one corner, a collection of decomposing dice that were once owned by magician Ricky Jay are on display. Another exhibit—a visual investigation of trailer parks around the LA area—is titled “The Garden of Eden on Wheels.” Visitors can also find stereographic radiographs of flowers, microscopic mosaics made from butterfly wing scales, and, yes, an odd collection of correspondence from amateur astronomers to the Mount Wilson Observatory written between 1915 and 1935. Since 2005, the MJT has even featured its Russian tea room, built in the style of Tsar Nicholas II’s study at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.

Firefight and Aftermath

In an extensive report of his own on the fire—which has appeared in places like LA Weekly and was originally published as an update to Weschler’s 1996 book Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, which investigated the origins of some of MJT’s most peculiar exhibits—the writer Lawrence Weschler first described how the blaze was discovered by MJT cofounder David Hildebrand Wilson. According to Weschler, Wilson and his wife, Diana Drake Wilson, live in a house directly behind the museum building, and it was from their bedroom window that the cofounder noticed the glow of flames behind a wall of the structure. Grabbing two fire extinguishers, Wilson ran to the scene and soon encountered “a ferocious column of flame roaring up the corner wall of the building that faces the street,” as he later described it to Weschler.

Despite Wilson’s efforts, however, the two extinguishers he had weren’t enough to combat the growing inferno. Luckily, his daughter and son-in-law then arrived on the scene with a more robust extinguisher and were able to beat the fire back just in time. If they had arrived only a minute later, Wilson was later told by the fire crew, the building would likely have been completely engulfed.

Though the damage was mostly confined to the gift shop, smoke had traveled throughout the building, leaving a thin film of residue behind on the walls, carpets, case vitrines, and more. To this day, the museum’s team and volunteers are still in the process of cleaning and repairing the damage, which Wilson has since likened to “having a thin creamy brown liquid… evenly poured over all the surfaces—the walls, the vitrines, the ceiling, the carpets, and eyepieces, everything.” That sort of smoke damage, Weschler added, is particularly challenging for a place like the MJT, which prides itself on curation and presentation. And so, in the meantime, he’s been asking for donations to the museum’s general fund, which would help cover losses and expedite recovery. This is, after all, “one of the most truly sublime institutions in the country,” Weschler wrote in his call for help. “It is a once-in-a-lifetime place,” he continued. “It is sui generis.”

The exact date of the MJT’s reopening is still unclear, but there’s some confidence that the museum will be back in full operation by next month. Until then, though, everyone’s just hoping that it lives up to its billing as one of the world’s oddest museums and, as Weschler described it, a “place where the so-called real and the so-called fake have been permanently and irrevocably sutured together.”