We’ve Already Got the Oddities; Now All We Need Is a Place to Put Them

Crime rates, criminally wretched traffic, the outdated airport, the crummy schools -- it all falls on Antonio Villaraigosa’s niftily tailored shoulders at lunchtime Friday. Instant indigestion.

The mayoral election campaign, the whole long, dreary slog of it, dwelt on mega Los Angeles, and rightly so. We’re something of a mega-mess.

But now, Mr. Mayor, we’d like you to spend a little time sweating the small stuff, the nano-issues, the quality-of-life problems that drive Angelenos out of their minds and into the ‘burbs. Everyone has one, and almost everyone has an idea on how to fix it. Recycling for apartment buildings. A sofa SWAT team to pick up the junk people dump in the streets. A website to establish once and for all how to pronounce “Micheltorena” and “Cienega” and “San Pedro.” And “Villaraigosa.”

And here is one of mine -- provide us with a big small thing we absolutely need: a museum of the city of Los Angeles.

We’ve tried everything else. Los Angeles and environs have put up a bunny museum, banana museum, lock museum, foot-and-toe museum, strippers’ hall of fame/museum and Coca-Cola museum. We’ve had -- and in some cases still have -- museums apotheosizing Hopalong Cassidy, the automobile, neon signs, brassieres (Madonna’s bustier was stolen during the riots), Max Factor makeup (with a kissing machine to test lipstick), hair, and the singular curiosities at the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

But our museums are as balkanized as the city itself, honoring significant parts of our character -- Chinese Americans, tar pits and, above all, Hollywood ad nauseam. But we are without a single unified civic museum devoted to our common past, our common interests.

How can I hold my head up in New York City, knowing as I do that New York -- a city whose official flag features two beavers and a couple of flour barrels -- has a museum of its own history, and L.A. doesn’t?

Mr. Mayor, I have just the place in mind. The Southwest Museum.

It’s the oldest museum in Los Angeles and it sits in Mount Washington, above Highland Park, looking like a Spanish castle or an above-Sunset Beverly Hills mansion, whichever is grander.

It’s a legacy of Charles Fletcher Lummis -- editor, writer (at this newspaper, in the interests of full disclosure), connoisseur, librarian, ethnographer -- and within its monumental walls is one of the country’s largest and choicest collections of Native American objects, gathered east to west from Plains Indians to the California coastal Chumash. What better starting point for an L.A. museum than a building whose own starting point was where the city’s human history begins -- with Native Americans?

A few years ago, the Southwest merged with the entity popularly known as the Autry Museum, but I’m sure that Villaraigosa’s powers of persuasion can work something out to the greater glory of both the City of Angels and the Singing Cowboy.

Let me steal a Hollywood word, one it uses to make remakes sound more inventive than they really are: “Re-imagined.” As long as the Autry is building a new home for the Southwest’s collection. why not “re-imagine” the entire place as the story of the city itself?

It opened in 1914, and not much has been done to it since, so now is the moment to start. By the time its centennial comes around, the re-imagined Southwest, the Museum of the City of Los Angeles (MOCOLA, accent on the first O) would be ready, and Vice President Villaraigosa could come back home to cut the ribbon.

Make it so, Mr. Mayor.

As for the rest of you Angelenos, here’s the coupon: weigh in, clip it out, send it off. I’ve done everything but lick the stamp. It’s your turn.

If the museum idea grows legs, I’ll donate a few pieces from my personal collection to the cause: An old Bullock’s credit card. A special Red Car schedule for the day Lindbergh spoke to tens of thousands at the Coliseum. A “Negro Who’s Who in California.” I’ll even cough up my 1950s can of “genuine Los Angeles smog.”