05.28.09
Back to the Southwest Museum
A couple weeks ago was MOTA Day (museums of the arroyo day 2009). MOTA consists of The Gamble House, Heritage Square Museum, The Los Angeles Police Historical Museum, Lummis Home and Garden, Pasadena Museum of History,and Autry’s Southwest Museum of the American Indian. My boys and I took advantage of that day and jumped in the bat mobile to finally go back and visit the Southwest Museum. For anyone who might be following along with this blog may remember we tried to visit this museum before, but it was closed. However, I did manage to post our experience of that day, which can be read here. This time, the Southwest Museum was not closed. BUT, when we got there, this is what we found. . .
And this. . .
Eh, what the. . . where’s the. . . what’s going on? Since the museum was open this time, we poked around a bit to see if there was anything to see anywhere. Nada, zip. Then we saw the sign that there was to be a tour of the Caracol Tower. Oh. . . what’s that? Let’s join the tour. . .
Okay, for an empty museum, it did turn out to be informative anyway. What our guide explained to us was that the museum was damaged in the Northridge earthquake, so had to be closed down. “But that was about 15 years ago!,” I interjected. “Yes,” replied our tour guide. The museum consisted of over 250,000 artifacts, which had to be removed one by one before any repair would could commence. Just moving the artifacts alone took about four “years!” “So, when will the museum be open so that we can see the displays?,” I asked. “Oh, about four or five more years from now. . .” Ack! What the. . .where’s the. . . what’s going on? LOL Well, yes, apparently the repair work is now almost finished. It’s only a matter of weeks, now, but remember, it took them about four years to take all the artifacts/displays out. So it only makes sense that it will now take another four years to put them all back in! What a bummer. . . BUT all is not lost. Apparently, the Southwest Museum has provided an online viewing of their artifacts which can be viewed from this link.
Another nice thing about visiting this empty museum was that the guide was informative. We learned that the Southwest Museum was the first museum in Los Angeles. It was founded by Charles Lummis in 1907. Who’s Charles Lummis? Well, he’s the handsome guy featured in black and white. . .
I’ll write more about Charles Lummis in another post. We did manage to visit the lummis House, too, but didn’t have enough time to visit the other museums. We had actually visited Heritage Square a while back during it’s open hours, but I still haven’t gotten around to uploading those pics and writing about it. Anyway, back to the Southwest Museum.
The architectural design of the museum replicated the old mission styles. Around 1895 Charles Lummis founded the Landmark Club which helped to revive the old adobe and mission style buildings.
While there were no artifacts to see, we at least were given a tour up their Caracol Tower. Evidently, it’s called the caracol tower because of the snail spiral the tower makes. Here’s a view looking down from midway up the tower.
Again at the top, the room was empty. There were scaffolding around the windows and the view looked like this from one of the windows.
Since there wasn’t much more to see up there, we headed back down and hopped back into the bat mobile and visited Charles Lummis’s house. I’ll post a little more on that on another post. So, just a reminder for anyone thinking of visiting the Southwest Museum, . . there aren’t any artifacts on display. . . There won’t be for another four or five years from now. Just thought I’d give you the heads up. . .
Marlakins
