The Petersen Automotive Museum

Abstract

THE PETERSEN AUTOMOTIVE MUSEUM RUDI V O L T I Whenever possible, a museum’s site should reflect its subject. The Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles is admirable in this regard. The apparent front of the building, a converted department store, is situated on Wilshire Boulevard (fig. 1), but its main entrance is in the rear, adjacent to a multistory parking lot. This is as it should be, for the stretch of Wilshire Boulevard on which it stands is, in Reyner Banham’s phrase, the nation’s first “linear downtown.” A cre­ ation of the automobile in the 1920s, Wilshire Boulevard’s “Miracle Mile” consisted of an assortment of department stores and smaller shops with car accessibility and free parking as their key attractions. The Petersen Automotive Museum opened on June 11, 1994, fi­ nancially endowed by a county bond issue and a $15 million grant from Robert Petersen. There is a close relationship between the mu­ seum’s subjects and the principal benefactor, for the Petersen fortune rests on a publishing empire that began with Hot Rod and now in­ cludes Car Craft, Motor Trend, and Motorcyclist. Automobiles are the central characters in the museum, but to a certain extent they serve as props in a larger tableau. The museum’s goal is not to display vast rows of significant automobiles, but to tell the story of southern California’s development as the first automobile-based metropolis. There is very little about the technical development of the automo­ bile, and nothing about its manufacture; instead, the museum’s dis­ plays highlight how we travel, live, consume, have fun, and get into trouble in the age of the automobile. The first floor of the museum contains seventeen dioramas that depict such scenes as the workshop where the first car was built in Los Angeles (by a young Carl Breer, who went on to become one of the main designers of the advanced but ill-fated Chrysler Airflow). (See figs. 2 and 3.) Other exhibits show how architecture and spatial patterns have reflected the dominance of automobile-based transpor­ tation: a 1920s bungalow with a new Willys-Knight in the driveway; a replica of southern California vernacular architecture, a greasy-spoon Dr. Volti is professor of sociology at Pitzer College, where his course offerings include Cars and Culture.© 1995 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/95/3603-0011501.00 646 The Petersen Automotive Museum 647 Fig. 1.—The Petersen Automotive Museum building is a converted department store on Los Angeles’s Wilshire Boulevard. (All photos by Lee Furon.) café in the shape of a dog; a 1950s drive-in restaurant; an early supermarket fronted by a parking lot. Visitors walk past and through these exhibits, and in the process are drawn into them. In the course of their travels through the exhibits, viewers come on a variety of scenes, not all of them didactic; one of the most eye-catching is a re-creation of a classic movie scene in which wax effigies of Laurel and Hardy sit in a Model T Ford that has been crunched between two trolley cars (fig. 4). For those who care to reflect on the deeper meaning of these scenes, there are smaller exhibits that show regional population densities correlated with established transportation corri­ dors, the evolution of the billboard, and the emergence of the garage as a prime residential feature. Ajarring note is provided by a wrecked Toyota Supra (one of three Japanese cars on display) below a sign noting, among other things, that 2,164,132 people were killed in au­ tomobile accidents from 1923 to 1982, and that despite major im­ provements in the safety of automotive travel, five people die in car accidents every hour in the United States. The second floor is more conventional in that it is populated by automobiles and little else. Here the car buff can revel in the hard­ ware with no historical or sociological distractions. A large number of cars are on display, but not so many as to numb the viewer. Every­ one will have his or her own favorites; the scope and quality of the...