Southwest Museum: Don’t Call Moving Van Yet : Art: The Mt. Washington facility continues to look at expansion as one of its options.

The Southwest Museum, facing growing protest in its community and among politicians over disclosures that it was considering moving, will reevaluate architectural plans for major expansion at its present Mt. Washington site, according to top museum officials.

Museum officials have scheduled a meeting today with an architectural firm involved in a mid-’80s feasibility study that looked into the possibility of expanding gallery and storage space and adding a parking garage, according to key board members and the museum director.

Meanwhile, Willis B. Wood Jr., chairman of the museum’s long-term planning committee, said that “a strong majority of the board, if not unanimous, close to unanimous” would prefer to find a solution to the museum’s problems that would make moving unnecessary.

Wood’s remark came in response to questions about an apparently increasing number of complaints over the museum’s decision to consider relocation proposals from real estate developers, local governments and other museums.

Concern has been voiced that the Southwest Museum, which has one of the nation’s major collections of American Indian art and artifacts, could go the way of New York City’s Museum of the American Indian. That museum was forced by financial pressures to merge with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The New York facility will eventually be closed.

“We are trying to find a solution for the museum without any preconceived ideas, except that we know we have a lot of problems here,” Wood said. He hopes to complete a study of options for the museum by the middle of the year, he said. “We disclosed what we were doing, probably the wrong way and inartfully, because we wanted the community to be aware, not because we had made a decision.”

Other recent developments relating to the Southwest Museum and its possible ripple effect on the nascent Latino Museum of History, Art and Culture, include:

* Museum officials have said that they may try to separately dispose of the Casa de Adobe, a reproduction built in the 1920s of an 1850s-era California hacienda, situated on North Figueroa Street near the Southwest Museum. The museum is also considering selling a house it owns adjacent to the Casa de Adobe.

* Members of the board of the newly organized Latino Museum, which is attempting to find a temporary or permanent site and is beginning to assemble its collection, said they had all but ruled out the possibility of locating at the Southwest Museum site.

That option was one of several proposed in a state-financed study regarding the Latino museum completed in 1987. Board members of both institutions agreed that the two museums are organizationally too incompatible to make any plan for shared quarters practical. Latino Museum board members said that even if the Southwest Museum were to move, the Southwest complex may require renovations that would be prohibitively expensive.

* The Latino Museum also was abandoning plans to move to temporary quarters at the present site of Lawry’s California Center. Lawry’s Foods Inc., which announced last year that it would gradually end seasoning manufacturing at the facility, said this week it was seeking a buyer for the entire property, including its Lawry’s California Center restaurant. The museum said the decision by Lawry’s made it impossible for the new Latino institution to respond quickly enough to consider purchasing the facility. The fate of the restaurant itself remained unclear.

The Southwest Museum has also said that anticipated operating budget deficits in view of a continuing recession may mean cutting back some of its operations within the next two weeks. Jerome Selmer, the museum’s executive director, declined to be specific, but said the cutbacks would be noticeable to the public. In past budget-crunch situations, the Southwest has restricted its hours of operation and closed its library.

Today’s scheduled discussions with the architectural firm that initially studied the possibility of expansion on the site do not mean the museum board has ruled out relocating the museum, however. The museum currently has 48,000 square feet of space; officials say the size of the facility needs to be doubled. The Italianate structure was built by Charles Fletcher Lummis in 1914.

“Let’s say that, if we were starting from scratch, is this where we would put the museum? Would it be this configuration?” asked Southwest Museum President James F. Dickason, in a recent interview that included Wood and Selmer. “The answer is obviously ‘No,’ ” Dickason said. “Is this the best place for us to be (now)? The answer is obviously ‘No.’ Can we survive here? Maybe, but there are a lot of strikes against it. This is the most god-awful layout that anybody could ever conceive.”

Wood said that disposition of the existing complex would necessarily be part of any decision the museum ultimately reaches.

“This complex has a lot of value to the city and the area,” he said. “It could be turned into a recreation facility tied into a park. It could be used as some sort of center to include art exhibits. A part of any move would be finding a useful purpose for this facility.”

Ricardo Lagorreta, a prominent Mexico City architect who has completed several major Southern California residential and commercial projects, was retained by the Southwest in the mid-’80s to produce models and drawings of a possible 30,000-square-foot expansion.

Museum officials said that they were unfamiliar with details of those plans, though several had seen a cardboard model of the proposed expansion.

Architect Sydney Brisker, who is affiliated with Lagorreta’s full-time Los Angeles office, was planning to meet with museum officials today, a spokesman said.

It was learned separately that Lagorreta and Brisker had produced detailed studies of everything from a multitiered parking garage to new galleries. Sources familiar with the studies said the two architects were convinced that construction of new facilities on the steep 12.5-acre museum site is feasible.

Their plan, the sources said, would be to produce a reconstructed museum that would take advantage of the slopes, retain the character of the original structure and still vastly expand facilities.

A coalition of community groups and politicians, including City Councilman Richard Alatorre, have formed a group called Save Our Southwest to persuade the museum to stay put. The coalition has called the board arrogant and criticized it for seemingly disregarding the role of the museum in the cultural life of the northeast area of Los Angeles.

Selmer denied those charges. He complained that only 157 people in the Mt. Washington, Highland Park and Eagle Rock communities maintain $45-a-year memberships in the Southwest Museum--out of more than 4,500 members on the museum’s rolls. He asserted that only about $750 was donated to the museum last year by residents in the immediate neighborhood.

“These people (community members who do not want the museum to relocate)) say, ‘Why haven’t these guys (the board) done a better job of raising money and assuring the museum’s continuation as a fixture of the neighborhood?’ ” Wood said. “And we find that most of them that we talk to aren’t even members.”