Southwest Museum (Birthday Month Adventure #2)

The Southwest Museum is another place I've always wanted to visit but hadn't until Birthday Adventure Month. Maybe always wanting to go but never having gone is one of my unconscious criteria for an adventure.

I'm determined to have at least one adventure per week this month. It's not easy to schedule adventures! I'm so focused on working. But adventures fuel me and I've never regretted one, even the ones that don't turn out like I expect them to. Especially those.

The Southwest Museum, the oldest museum in Los Angeles, looms over the Pasadena freeway, all southwestern/Spanishy in the sun. Damage from the 1994 Northridge Earthquake was so extensive the building had to be closed, and eventually it was acquired by the Autry Museum along with its extensive collections of Native American pottery, baskets and weavings, not just from the southwest but from all over the country. There's a complicated history to this. This link was sent to me by a friend.

There's only one exhibit room open right now, and a few pieces displayed in a downstairs hallway. I found the straw sandal to be the most affecting. It's a fine exhibit, but don't go expecting a full day. The Museum is open Saturdays only. It's free, there's plenty of parking, and you'll see glorious Native American pottery, some pieces as much as 500 years old, some from the late 20th century.

The website is a bit misleading. I clicked on a link for the cafe but it turns out that's at the Autry. We were so hungry that we skipped out without seeing the tunnel, approached from the disabled parking lot on a lower level of the hill. The elevator's not working right now, so if you are wheelchair-bound you're restricted to the upper level. But that's where the pottery is so you'll see most of the good stuff (but not the sandal).

An adventure doesn't always turn out like you expect it to. That's adventure by definition, in a way.

You might want to enlarge this one to appreciate the snow-covered San Gabriel peaks in the distance. This is a view I hadn't seen before, easily gained by stepping to the edge of the parking lot at the Southwest Museum.

Note: Pasadena Adjacent was across the Arroyo from us at about the time of these photos. She was painting watercolor #19 in a series.

Los Angeles Archives, I

In another life, a dream life, I was an archivist. I worked among the dusty files, cataloged and notated maps, learned to preserve the oldest books. I researched the answers to obscure questions. I found letters that had been lost and forgotten, and brought them back to life. I was a curator of the arcane.

This is the life of Los Angeles Archivist Michael Holland, who gave me a tour of the City Archives the other day. First, he showed me this room:

 

Neither words nor photographs can do justice to this space. I gasped quite a bit before pulling myself together to photograph Michael in the presence of 290,000 boxes of files. The shelves on the left securely hold box after box, from floor to ceiling. The shelves on the right are a vestige of those that were used before the Northridge Earthquake of 1994. To say the least, the quake showed the necessity for change.

The contents of boxes are known by the department that generated them, and not necessarily by Michael and his staff. Each box can be located by a bar code.

I love looking down this dark hallway of shelves. A mystery could happen there. An electric current runs through the line on the floor to guide the fork lifts. And a fork lift can raise a person to the highest shelves.

Michael told me many stories. My favorite: through a complicated bureaucratic process, some files become obsolete and are eventually slated for destruction. It's a cycle. Since the Northridge quake, some of those that were set to be destroyed remain undiscovered. They're still in the archives, possibly mis-marked or not marked at all. An intern is working to find them. A quarter of a million boxes is, after all, a lot to go through, and our Archivist does what he can with a small budget. Other things are of more immediate concern.

This is the original deed to Griffith Park. The original.

You can visit the Los Angeles Archives, too. (You even can see some records online.) If you want a tour, just call for an appointment. If you want to see a specific document, you need to call ahead for that, too, so the document can be found and retrieved for you.

Michael can often be heard on KPCC's Off Ramp with John Rabe, Saturdays 12-1pm and Sundays 6-7pm. Thanks to Anne Louise Bannon for setting up the tour and coming with me. There's another room and I took a lot of pictures so there'll be more in a few days.