Op-Ed: Another little piece of L.A.’s soul disappears, at the sleek new Petersen Automotive Museum

When my son Noah was little, the Petersen Automotive Museum — the car museum, we used to call it — was one of the touchstones of his world. In many ways, they grew up together; the Petersen opened on June 11, 1994, only a few months before Noah was born. Beginning when he was 1, we went to the museum around once a week, and we quickly developed a routine that lasted for a decade or so: Start with the immersive streetscape on the ground floor, with its trolley homage to Laurel and Hardy (Noah always spent time in the driver’s seat), its Helms Bakery bread truck, its grocery store and auto showroom, then move on to the second floor, where there was a fully detailed hot rod shop and all those movie cars. Our visits would generally wrap up in the third floor playroom.

Noah is now 21, and it’s been a long time since either one of us has been to the museum. We missed its reopening in December, although as residents of the neighborhood, we watched as a new facade, featuring a latticework of stainless steel, was erected around the windowless space. The design is one we both like for its sense of spectacle — especially at night, when the building is strikingly lit. In that regard, it reminds me of the interior of the old Petersen: kitschy, more than a little over-the-top, a reminder not to take the place too seriously. A museum, in other words, that was not stuffy, as so many museums tend to be.

When I say the old Petersen, I mean the old Petersen, because the new museum no longer plays by such irreverent rules. We visited, finally, a Sunday or so ago. As per the advice of the docent, we took the elevator to the third floor and worked our way down — exactly the opposite of how we used to navigate the space.

The new museum is themed by floor: History, Industry, Artistry. Cars and motorcycles are arrayed like, yes, museum pieces: static, sterile, separated from environment. This has long been my issue with museums, the notion that they strip art of context — or more accurately, impose a “museum” context of their own.

The appeal of the old Petersen was in how it played with that idea, offering a context we could conjure with. That was the draw of that first floor panorama — not that it was educational but that it got the imagination engaged. I’m not only referring here to children; if my pleasure was partly watching my son race around those ersatz sidewalks, it also had to do with experiencing the illusion, the whisper of another Los Angeles, one lost to time. I loved the odd nuances of the space: the back alley dressed up like a 1930s movie set; the mannequin motorcycle cop standing behind a billboard, in his bow tie and riding boots.

All that has been stripped away, in favor of clean lines and scholarship. Noah grumbled about it from the outset, and I didn’t disagree. This new museum was efficient, even comprehensive, in its way, but it wasn’t much fun. It didn’t stir us to do much except keep moving, one display to the next. We stopped and admired the motorcycles (Noah is a rider), and the theme cars. We glanced at the production galleries and the performance vehicles. Yet there were few points of intersection, little for us to do but look.

Not only that, but the personality of the place, its connection to the city, was no longer clear. “It used to be a museum about Los Angeles,” Noah said once we reached the ground floor. “Now it’s just a museum.” He was talking about the missing panorama, its loving nods to local history, and also to the hot rod shop. In the early 1960s, Tom Wolfe compared hot rods to the fashion and architecture of Regency England: “They are freedom, style, sex, power, motion, color — everything is right there.” Wolfe’s argument was that car culture, and especially this car culture, was an artistic movement indigenous to Southern California, an idea around which the original Petersen Museum had revolved.

There was something else, I realized, as we stood in the lobby of the museum. The Petersen was part of Noah’s childhood, like Kiddieland, a small amusement park on the site that became the Beverly Center, had been for a prior generation of Angelenos. The museum wasn’t turned into a mall, but it had been gutted just the same. History, we often forget, is personal as much as it is collective, which means a city is composed of memories, of stories, as well as destinations or landmarks. It had never been the Petersen that was important; it had been our Petersen, which existed, pristine, in recollection until we decided to revisit it.

There’s a moral here, and it’s not hard to figure out: You can’t go home again. For me, this is an old lesson, if only imperfectly learned. For my son, however, the experience was raw, immediate: a reminder of what time can strip away.

David L. Ulin is a contributing writer to Opinion, a 2015 Guggenheim fellow and the author of “Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles.”

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