The night the museum nearly vanished.

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA—The Museum of Jurassic Technology (MJT), one of Los Angeles’ most offbeat institutions, has suffered significant damage to its building as a result of a fire last month. According to a July 14 report by the Los Angeles Times, the fire, which was first noticed on the evening of July 8, destroyed the museum’s gift shop and caused smoke damage across multiple exhibits. Losses of revenue while the museum is closed are expected to be in the vicinity of $75,000, with plans to reopen sometime next month.

The museum has occupied a somewhat cult-like but beloved niche in Los Angeles culture since it opened in Culver City in 1988. Founded by David Hildebrand Wilson and Diana Drake Wilson, the museum’s deliberately confounding and sometimes unreliable exhibits have attracted visitors from across the world. Openly advertising itself as “dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic,” the museum contains little in the way of items from that period. Instead, it models itself more on cabinets of curiosity, Renaissance-era collections of wunderkammer objects that served as one of the first forerunners to modern museums.

This approach to displaying items has given the museum a certain reputation in recent decades. Some displays are entirely made up of historical artifacts, while others were created to satirize aspects of science, the arts, or other topics. Visitors are often not informed which is which, as the museum makes no attempts to distinguish them. One of the permanent exhibits at the MJT, for example, is a showcase for the life’s work of Athanasius Kircher, a 17th-century Jesuit priest with an eclectic knowledge of seemingly every field of study. Another is a celebration of ultra-miniature sculptures created by Armenian artist Hagop Sandaldjian. So small are Sandaldjian’s works that many of them are displayed on the eye of a needle, and are made out of a single human hair.

Other displays range even further into the bizarre. In one room of the museum, visitors can view decomposing dice collected by magician Ricky Jay. “The Garden of Eden on Wheels” is a visual compendium of trailer parks across the greater Los Angeles area. The museum also hosts stereographic radiographs of flowers, microscopic mosaics made from the scales of butterfly wings, and an odd assortment of letters sent to the Mount Wilson Observatory by amateur astronomers between 1915 and 1935. And since 2005, the museum has even included a Russian tea room designed after Tsar Nicholas II’s study at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.

Firefight and Aftermath

In a more complete account of the incident published by writer Lawrence Weschler (whose 1996 book Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder delved into the origins of many of the MJT’s exhibits), David Wilson first noticed the flames in the building from the house he lives in next door. Wilson ran to the museum with two fire extinguishers, but found the building’s corner wall facing the street already engulfed in flames. “A ferocious column of flame,” Wilson later described the fire, “climbing … the corner wall facing the street.”

He was unable to put the fire out with the extinguishers at his disposal, however, and was only able to avert complete disaster when his daughter and son-in-law showed up with a larger extinguisher moments later. The couple was able to knock down the flames before first responders arrived. The fire chief later informed Wilson that the building as a whole would have burned to the ground if firefighters had arrived one minute later.

Damage from the fire was mostly confined to the gift shop, but smoke spread throughout the museum. Wilson likened the effect to having “a thin creamy brown liquid… evenly poured over all the surfaces—the walls, the vitrines, the ceiling, the carpets, and eyepieces, everything.” The amount of smoke infiltration presents a significant challenge for the staff and volunteers, who have been working full-time to clean and restore the affected exhibits. According to Weschler, who has been working to drum up support for the museum’s general fund, it is “slow, exhausting, backbreaking” but necessary.

“The MJT is one of the most truly sublime institutions in the country, easily the most genuinely singular,” Weschler added in the appeal. “It's simple refusal to fall within any categorical boxes we customarily call ‘science,’ ‘art,’ or even ‘storytelling’ has made it one of the rarest of places on earth.” No official reopening date has yet been set, though it is anticipated that the museum will bounce back with the same special brand of satire, scholarship, and surreality that made it popular in the first place.