Museum to Have Major Expansion

Officials of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History on Thursday announced an ambitious $30-million capital expansion project to enlarge the third-largest natural history museum in the nation.

Dr. Craig Black, the museum’s director, said an estimated $9 million already has been raised from private and corporate sources for the project--which will include a Hall of Native American Culture, a remodeled wing with the largest bird collection in the United States and an underground parking facility for about 700 cars.

In announcing the plans at a news conference, Black and members of the museum’s board of trustees said the plan will increase the museum’s exhibition space by almost 20% and thus help maintain the museum’s prominence as a science and history center.

The expansion was described as the largest in the museum’s 73-year history and comes at a time when Los Angeles is in the midst of a museum building boom.

Now Has Three Wings

Built in 1913 in Exposition Park, adjacent to the USC campus, the natural history museum originally consisted of a main foyer and three large wings in the Spanish Renaissance style. Several expansion projects over the years, the last one in 1976, have increased the facility’s exhibition space to about 250,000 square feet.

Museum officials also want to attract more people to a neighborhood perceived by many to be unsafe. To underscore their commitment to the neighborhood, officials said the bulk of the $30 million--about $22 million--will be spent in and around the museum building.

“We hope to maintain the level of excitement that we saw here during the (1984) Olympics,” Black said. “This is a livable place.”

Despite whatever qualms some may have about the area, the museum nevertheless attracts more visitors--1.5 million a year--than any other museum in California, officials said.

Major components of the expansion and renovation work, scheduled to be completed by 1988 for the observance of the museum’s 75th anniversary, include:

- A $10-million, 40,000-square-foot new wing, facing Exposition Boulevard, that will house the museum’s collection of dinosaur skeletons and life-sized models of other animals. The multistoried addition will explain how animal and plant life has developed in the last 4 billion years.

- A $3-million, 9,000-square-foot Hall of American Cultures, to be named after Times Mirror Co., the parent company of The Times, which is contributing to the project. The hall will showcase Navajo textiles, California and Great Basin baskets, Southwest pottery and archeological materials gathered in Southern California--both newly acquired artifacts and materials already in collection.

- A 110,000-square-foot Great Bird Hall and Research Center to display the museum’s collection of 103,000 birds. Dr. Ralph W. Schreiber, the museum’s curator of ornithology, said the hall, to be built for $3 million, will feature three habitats--a wetland marsh, a display that will focus on the endangered California condor and a tropical rain forest.

- A 700-auto underground parking garage. Black said the garage will allow museum officials to add more greenery to the surrounding area by doing away with two parking lots facing Exposition Boulevard.

Sensory Exhibits

Also planned are a discovery center, which will give visitors “multisensory experiences,” allowing them to touch many museum artifacts, and a chaparral hall that will highlight ecological life in the nearby Santa Monica Mountains.

The rest of the funds will be used to finance museum displays that can travel to other communities in the area and to support the George C. Page Museum of La Brea Discoveries, which is part of the county Natural History Museum.

Otis Chandler, chairman of the Executive Committee of Times Mirror Co., was present at the news conference to present the first portion of a $1-million donation on behalf of Times Mirror Foundation.

No public funds will be sought for the project, museum officials said. The museum has an operating budget of $8.4 million, $6.1 million of which comes from Los Angeles County.