ALISO VIEJO : Gulf War Blamed for Museum Demise

The Museum of Natural History and Science, which for a brief time was the county’s first and only natural science museum, is still without a home after closing its doors in May.

The defunct museum, which was a two-story, 32,000-square-foot facility in Aliso Viejo, opened to robust business in December, 1990, drawing an average of 1,000 visitors per week.

But museum officials were forced to close down the facility after less than six months of operation because attendance had dwindled to a dismal 20 to 30 people per day.

“I think the poor attendance was more war-related than recession-related,” said Edward Pitts, a member of the museum’s board of trustees. “We opened strong, but the (Gulf War) just sapped everything. When the bombs started falling, everyone stayed home to watch CNN and we never recaptured our momentum.”

Despite the setback, museum officials said last week that they have not given up hope of someday reopening the museum, which took three years of planning and featured fossils and artifacts that had been collected over 17 years by the Natural History Foundation of Orange County.

Exhibit space included robotic dinosaur displays and space equipment mock-ups, as well as local fossils and Indian artifacts. The museum had one of the largest marine-mammal fossil collections in the nation.

“I think another museum will happen,” Pitts said. “It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when. We’ve learned a number of lessons from our experience in Aliso Viejo and we are going to put them to good use.”

After the closure, the foundation, formed in 1974 to encourage the display of local archeological finds, moved its administrative offices to the Eastbluff School in Newport Beach.

The foundation had hoped that the Aliso Viejo museum would be enough of a success to lead to a larger, permanent facility nearby.

“We thought that we would be able to make the museum run on a long-term basis, then start a capital campaign to build a permanent major facility,” Pitts said. “We looked at the Aliso Viejo building as an interim site.”

The permanent museum envisioned by the foundation would have been about 100,000 square feet and had been proposed for a 25-acre site at Pectin Reef in Aliso/Wood Canyons Regional Park. Projected cost for the project had been put at $40 million, Pitts said.

The thousands of fossils and artifacts that were featured in the museum are now stored at no cost to the foundation in three warehouses, two owned by the county and one owned by a foundation member.

But Pitts said the prehistoric gems won’t be in storage for long--even if a new museum isn’t opened soon. The foundation will meet next month to further discuss plans to offer educational exhibits to public and private organizations.

“We’ve spent the last two to three months rethinking our strategy,” Pitts said. “We’re going to try and operate the foundation on a program basis for things like summer science projects and field trips.

“We want to try and bring the museum experience to people, as opposed to them coming to a museum with four walls. We want them to experience it in bits and pieces, at least.”