The Southwest Museum of the American Indian no longer exists
Gentle reader,
This email is an update to our 2019 blog post about hopes for the future of Northeast L.A.’s Southwest Museum, published when the Autry Museum announced that it was seeking developers to take over the historic building.
Four years later, not only has no new owner taken charge, but…
The Southwest Museum of the American Indian no longer exists. Sure, you can still see the big white building shining on Mount Washington, overlooking the Arroyo Seco and founder Charles Fletcher Lummis' home, but according to Google maps, it's gone.
We assume that that whoever controlled the business listing asked for it to be removed.
Last September, LACMA on Fire reported that the Southwest Museum had been shuttered again, apparently following a failed fire inspection. Around this time, The Autry Museum of the American West told The Eastsider that it had "recently executed a pre-development agreement" for use of the Southwest Museum and Casa de Adobe, but declined to name the developer. Nine months later, there has been nothing shared with the public.
We have obtained that failed fire inspection performed by Inspector Frank Acevedo of the Public Assemblage Unit through a public records request, and you can read it here.
The report reflects the Autry Museum's shocking failure to maintain the most basic standards for any public building, including annual tests of the battery powered emergency lighting, patching holes in walls and replacing missing roof tiles, repairing the inoperable fire alarm system, recharging the fire extinguishers, testing smoke alarms and maintaining up-to-date exit signs. Instead of performing these trivial fixes, the Autry chose to shut the Southwest Museum down.
As we have seen on Google maps, that closure extends beyond the physical building and into the virtual realm. The web page about the Southwest Museum that was accessible as recently as August 2022 now redirects to a general "about the Autry" page with no mention of its stewardship of the city's first museum and its world class collection of Native American cultural artifacts.
If you share our distress that the Southwest Museum has been indefinitely closed and symbolically erased following minor LAFD citations, you can send an email to communications@theautry.org asking that the Southwest be brought back into fire safety compliance and reopened. CC us when you do at tours@esotouric.com.
And about that 2019 Request for Interest (RFI): we met with the National Trust team at the Southwest Museum and submitted a proposal for a sightseeing tour and lecture series drawing on Charles Fletcher Lummis' work as a preservationist and documentarian. We never got a response, and as far as we know, no one else did, either. But we did get a chance to tour the sad, empty museum and even to climb up the Mayan-inspired caracol tower and see the magnificent view that Lummis gave to his fellow Angelenos.
We share that magical view with you here, as well as the steps we took to reach it, in the sincere hope that 2023 will be the year that this significant cultural landmark, which was stolen from Angelenos under false pretenses with the help of City Hall, will reopen for real. It is your Southwest Museum, no matter what they tell you. And it will be yours forever.
Original blog post 3/19/2019: March was a sacred month for Charles Fletcher Lummis, that remarkable character who gave so much to his adopted home of Los Angeles and to the greater Southwest. It was the month of his birth, and the time of the wildest of the revels hosted in his stone castle home along the Arroyo, honoring himself and his fellow “March Hares.”
How tone-deaf of the Autry Museum of the American West to choose March to announce that, having taken possession of the Southwest Museum’s priceless collections and endowment following the institutions’ 2003 merger, it would be seeking proposals from developers to take over the white elephant on the hill, the institution erected by Lummis as the culmination of a lifetime of collecting, interpreting and preserving the cultural history of the region.
The tale of the decline and erasure of the city’s first museum is long and depressing. It includes artifact theft by administrators, neglected infrastructure and collection care, and a failure by the City of Los Angeles to do its due diligence when the Autry family came calling with empty promises to make all the Southwest’s problems go away.
Since then, it has been a tale of bad faith from the Autry and hard, heartbreaking work by community groups seeking to protect Lummis’ great gift and hold those who control it accountable.
The future of the Southwest Museum will be debated soon, in the court of public opinion, in the press and at City Hall. Before Los Angeles considers what to do with this endangered National Treasure landmark, it’s beholden on anyone who cares to look to the source and understand what has been lost during these dark years of the Autry’s control of the Southwest Museum, and what potentially will be lost forever if the redevelopment plan is allowed to go forward.
We direct you to this 1910 pamphlet, published by the Southwest Society of the Archaeological Institute of America: Two great gifts: the Lummis library and collections and the Munk library.
In it, you will find the text of the last will and testament of Charles Fletcher Lummis, explaining his reasoning for gifting his valuable collections of art and artifacts and a library of 5000 items to the newly formed Southwest Museum, a promise made in the sacred month of March on the occasion of his 51st birthday.
The gift was an expression of Lummis’ faith in the potential of Los Angeles to become a great cultural center, and of his determination that the disparate materials that only he could have collected should remain forever intact and accessible in an institution dedicated to their study and interpretation.
If old man Lummis were to stumble today out of a time machine and discover what has become of his beloved Southwest Museum, we would hear oaths and epithets of a vehemence seldom expressed among cultured people. For the incredible gift that he so carefully prepared for the edification and delight of future generations has been squandered and cannibalized, again and again. Lummis would be well be within his rights to demand that his collections, no longer freely available for public use at the Southwest Museum, revert to the possession of his heirs.
Read his will. And if his words move you, as they do us, do not let the story of the Southwest Museum be a slow motion train wreck ending in its complete loss. Say NO to the commercialization of this historic institution. Demand that the Autry honor their commitment to preserve and reactivate our city’s first museum, or step aside and allow the collection and buildings to be cared for by an institution that will.
yours for Los Angeles,
Kim & Richard
Esotouric
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UPCOMING BUS & WALKING TOURS
Echo Park Book of the Dead Bus Tour (Sat. 7/1) • New! The Run: Gay Downtown History Walk (Sat. 7/8) •Westlake Park Walk (Sat. 7/15) • Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles Bus Tour (Sat. 7/22) • Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue Walk (Sat. 8/5) • Charles Bukowski’s Los Angeles Bus Tour (Sat. 8/12)
As I wrote in the email to the Autry, I was with my daughter's class to tour the Southwest Museum. It's unfortunate that greedy thieves have taken some, if not all, the artifacts within its walls. There goes our shared heritage.
Sad