Antique Toy Cars Parked in Museum Exhibit : Nostalgia: Miniature automobiles from two private collections are displayed in Santa Monica Heritage show.

The Santa Monica Heritage Museum is having an antique car show.

But this museum, which is on the second floor of a restored Victorian house in the city’s Ocean Park section, is small, and so are the cars.

“Isn’t this beautiful?” asked museum director Tobi Smith as she leaned down to point out the detail work on a 1934 Chrysler Airflow. The car was only a few inches high and made entirely of rubber. Like the more than 600 other cars in the exhibit, it was made as a toy, and its makers probably never imagined that it would end up in a museum.

The show, called “Gasoline Alley,” will be at the museum until Feb. 2.

“People are never quite sure when they climb the stairs what they will find up here,” said Smith, who was once a key player in the Los Angeles avant-garde art scene. “Sometimes it looks like any other contemporary art gallery, with contemporary art on the walls. Sometimes it might look like a mountain lodge, like it did when we did a Pendleton blanket show. And sometimes we have toys.”

When Smith decided to exhibit model cars, she first contacted Ira Bernstein, who is known for his toy car collection.

Bernstein, who is retired as manager of the Shubert Theatre in Century City, agreed to loan hundreds of models from his 5,000-car collection and also referred Smith to Bob Blake, a retired film editor living in Sun Valley.

“I have loved toy cars all my life, but I didn’t start collecting until about 15 years ago,” said Blake, 57, who was an editor on a number of TV shows, including “Hill Street Blues,” “Lou Grant” and “Dynasty.” He said he retired two years ago to pursue a number of personal interests, including toy cars.

It all started with an innocuous visit to a swap meet. “I was at that Rose Bowl swap meet, and I saw a little rubber car that I had had as a child,” he said. “I bought it for, I think, $5. Then I bought another the same day.”

“I had always loved design, especially the design of cars from the late ‘30s and early ‘40s. I wanted to be an automotive designer, but I got sidetracked into the motion picture business. Collecting was my way of getting back into cars,” he said.

Blake began using his hiatuses between TV seasons to travel to antique toy shows around the country. He even took an 18-country European trip expressly to meet other collectors to make deals and trades.

“Several times I have bought whole collections to get from them what I want, then I sell off the others,” Blake said.

Some of his cars, he said, are rarities worth several thousand dollars.

Even with his loan of several hundred cars to the museum exhibit, Blake has plenty left in the lighted display cases that have taken over a wing of his home.

“I can take a cup of coffee back into the toy room and just lose myself for hours,” he said.

For the museum exhibit, Smith divided Blake’s and Bernstein’s toys into several categories, mostly according to the materials used to make them. The earliest models on display are cast iron, including a 1905 Kenton that has a rudder-shaped steering device instead of a wheel.

There are also stamped metal toys, including a 1917 Scheible fire engine, rubber cars from the 1930s with Art Deco designs, the first plastic cars and extremely detailed models made of tin in Japan in the 1950s and 1960s. Miniature metal cars are shown in their plastic display cases, and there is a set of French “Jouets a Transformation” cars that have interchangeable body parts.

Finally, in a catchall “odds and ends” category are such items as glass cars that were once filled with candy, bathtub toys and a large bus that was a promotion for the Jackie Gleason TV show “The Honeymooners.”

Down low in one of the display areas are two large, ornately decorated cars, one with a flower design that has four characters inside vaguely resembling the Beatles and another with a clown sticking out of the roof. “They are down low because I didn’t want them in the show,” Smith said with a laugh. “I didn’t want them in with all these other beautifully designed cars that are so restrained and subtle. But Ira (Bernstein) wanted them in, so I did it.”

Smith set off the exhibit’s different sections with street signs borrowed from the city of Santa Monica and other car-related items such as tires. “We get as much as possible donated,” said Smith. “We hustle all that we can.”

The museum has an annual operating budget of about $175,000 generated from donations and grants. It is owned and operated by a nonprofit group that has been given the use of the house by the city on a long-term lease. (The house, designed by noted architect Sumner Hunt and built in 1894, was saved from demolition by the city and moved to its current site in 1977.) The downstairs has been restored and furnished to show what a typical Santa Monica house might have looked like early in the century. In the kitchen are revolving displays of California pottery.

Smith hosts the eclectic exhibits upstairs. Since becoming director, she has presented shows of historical radios, Monterey furniture, Southern California landscape paintings, quilts and items from the career of actress Myrna Loy, who grew up in the area.

“We are the only museum that does decorative-type shows,” Smith said.

A museum that delves into nostalgia is a big departure for Smith, who was closely tied to the development of the Los Angeles Institute for Contemporary Art, one of the most influential local avant-garde galleries of the 1970s and early 1980s. Her former husband, Robert Smith, was the founding director of the institute, and she did development work to raise donations and grants for its programs.

Robert Smith quit in 1985, and the Smiths moved to Ojai. They were later divorced, and she moved back to Los Angeles.

“I did left-wing art until left-wing art got boring,” she said, standing amid the hundreds of little cars in the exhibition. “Now I do something that is more fun.”

* “Gasoline Alley” is at the Santa Monica Heritage Museum, 2612 Main St., Santa Monica. Hours: 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and noon-4 p.m. Sunday through Feb. 2. Free. Information: (310) 392-8537.