Where the Past Is a Gas : The history and effect of the motorcar--and our love-hate relationship with it--are on full display at the new Petersen Automotive Museum. Here, no detail is too small or too trivial.

A cluster of dead, dried flies at the Petersen Automotive Museum will be allowed to rest in peace. They were brought in a box from Beverly Hills by a museum sponsor who insisted that no replica of Culver City’s old Dog Cafe diner would be complete without bugs belly-up on the window sill.

That galvanized steel bucket at the antique Richfield gas station? It wasn’t for washing windshields.

They typically belonged to teen-age pump jockeys who slyly drained dregs from hoses and nozzles and salvaged enough gas for a night’s cruising in their ’32 Ford Highboys.

And what about Jamm’s, the museum’s neon and neo-deco rebirth of a drive-in coffee shop?

The name is a play on Pann’s , which has been serving Joe and cholesterol at La Cienega and La Tijera since the ‘50s. But Jamm’s is built from the first-name initials of four museum planners: Jim Olson, Alan Hess, Matt Roth and Marc Whipple.

And the real, drivable, ketchup-red ’59 Cadillac convertible parked outside the faux and false-fronted restaurant belongs to one planner, acting director Olson.

If it seems that Olson, exhibit consultant Hess, curator Roth and architect Whipple just had too much fun assembling the Petersen Automotive Museum--well, who said reproducing local history and recovering its relics had to be dull?

If it appears they left no minutiae unturned--bet your new Saturn they did.

Because the quiet purpose behind last month’s opening of the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum’s fifth and newest member was not just to touch the 82-year-old museum’s bases of history, science and art--but to be livelier, more sweeping, easier on the brain and much hipper than a dozen auto palaces from Detroit to San Diego.

“It began as a negatively stated concept: ‘We are not going to be an indoor parking lot. . . . We are not going to be a grille show,’ ” Roth recalls. “Having stated that, what were we going to be?

“We were going to be dedicated to explaining and presenting the history of the automobile and its impact on American life and culture--using Los Angeles as a prime example.”

Prime, indeed. From steam cars hammered together in 1901 by Louis Breer in a blacksmith’s shop at 215 San Pedro St. to vehicles for 2001 being sketched in secret at local design studios, the automobile has been both deity and antichrist to Angelenos.

It has provided transportation, freedom, recreation, status, investment and made Southern California the world’s largest, richest car market. It also has produced smog, gridlocks, SigAlerts, carjackings, drive-by shootings, and fatal accidents while making Los Angeles the car-theft capital of the world.

“Around a mission statement in the abstract, we had to create reality,” Roth continues. “So, through dioramas and galleries we are telling how people of Los Angeles travel . . . the role of the car in domestic life . . . how did people buy things by car . . . gas stations and billboards . . . strip malls that began here in 1925 and the Dog Cafe diner . . . the California Highway Patrol, racing on board tracks and the car as family recreation.

“Our biggest challenge was to slice up the history of 20th-Century Los Angeles and its love-hate relationship with the automobile and find a reasonable place to start.”

But looking around, seeing exhibits of a red Toyota wadded by a freeway accident in contrast to the suburban peace of a two-car garage containing an Edsel and a 1948 MG-TCB, Roth believes “we bite a pretty good chunk out of how the car changed the shape and appearance of this city.”

The breadth of the museum, he says, is far from incidental. It reaches beyond a relatively few car enthusiasts and touches millions who simply invest in daily transportation.

“We knew that if we built it, the car people would come,” Olson says. “Then it became abundantly clear, before we brought the cars in, that most of the exhibits on the first floor, the service station, the homes, worked fine without the cars.”

Because . . . those sets stir memories, present domestic tableaux and are part of a Los Angeles tale every resident shares. The Dog Cafe, for example, exhibits more architectural form--it’s a pipe-smoking bulldog--than automotive style and was designed to attract motorists speeding down Washington Boulevard.

Because . . . a 1934 Los Angeles Times billboard (“Mister, Here’s a Real Paper!”) with a motorcycle cop lurking to ambush speeders, and a California bungalow proud of its chimney of river-washed rocks, are not things that happened a century ago in some foreign land.

The $40-million museum--on Miracle Mile and housed in the old, now unrecognizable Ohrbach’s department store at Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue--is four floors and 300,000 square feet of display space.

Its name commemorates, in his lifetime, automotive magazine Publisher Robert E. Petersen, 67, and wife Margie, who pledged $15 million to help build the museum. Personal galleries--one sponsored by Bruce Meyer of Beverly Hills, president of Geary’s, another by Los Angeles car collectors James Hull and Peter and Pamela Mullin--have sold for as much as $250,000.

Membership in a booster club costs $1,000.

The museum is looking for a few good persons to serve as models for wax mannequins. No experience necessary. But a $20,000 donation is essential.

Even the museum shop--despite its full inventory of $1 lapel pins and $10 T-shirts--shows touches that are more Rolls-Royce than GM. A carpet tapestry of dueling Ferraris: $30,000. A gold, diamond and ruby race car charm: $6,000.

None has sold.

“But let’s find out they don’t sell,” Roth suggests. “If they do, that’s a pretty good hit.”

Museum admission, fortunately, is $7 for adults and $3 for children 5 to 12 years old.

And the experience is Knott’s Berry Farm meets the Smithsonian with special effects by Universal Studios.

First floor: The dioramas are a back lot of the ages, a circular street with manhole covers, curbs and a big city feel. There’s a 1919 Auburn and Cord showroom on Hollywood Boulevard from a friendlier time when car salesmen weren’t contract consultants. Also a dim, Downtown back alley smelling of soot and old paint and a sad, stolen 1931 Ford Coupe ready for stripping.

Delight, again, is with the details.

Businesses show weathering, and the adobe skirts of suburban homes are stained by sprinklers. Birds sing in trees. Mom calls from upstairs. From two houses and a fruit market--via hidden fans blowing scented oils--come California aromas: chocolate chip cookies, apple pie and oranges.

Second Floor: A bazaar of cars and motorcycles, an ocean of Simonize filling five galleries crowned by the Mullin-Hull collection of Delahayes, Delages and Bugattis from the ‘30s and ‘40s. They are fiercely French, in vivid colors with sensual lines swooping and chuckling at life and its conventions.

A gallery of Los Angeles’ faded dreams is here. Of the mid-engined 1965 Getaway two-seater that never went into production and thus failed to create jobs. Of the bulbous 1937 Airmobile three-wheeler whose inventor promised to undersell Ford or Chevrolet but didn’t sell one.

And--in fitting tribute to this company town--the cars of Clark Gable, Jean Harlow and Fred Flintstone.

Third Floor: Wall to gallery to elevator automotive art. As prints and originals, photo realism and photographic assemblages. By Jane Gottlieb, Harold Cleworth and Peter Tytla.

Fourth floor: To open soon as a conference and banquet center.

As complete as it currently views, the Petersen Automotive Museum is far from finished. Nor, officials say, can it ever be whole. For audiences change, automotive history is constantly expanding, and even museum techniques are being revised.

“It’s been 82 years since the Natural History Museum was completed and it’s still not finished,” Olson says. “So 82 years from now we’ll still be working on this one.”

One improvement will be a hands-on educational area for students, recently made possibly by a $1-million grant from the May Co. Undeveloped basement bays are being examined as sites for automobile-club gatherings because, Olson says, this museum must “become the heartbeat of the hobby . . . the focus of auto activities in Southern California.”

More mannequins are needed in the Auburn showroom. The blacksmith shop could use extra pieces of tack and horse collars. There should be more clutter than buckets around the service station. Maybe lights, cameras and live actors could demonstrate how cutaway cars are used in movie-making.

Roth’s personal hope is that time will trim the facility’s title. He fears “Petersen Automotive Museum” suggests just another haughty warehouse of unobtainable cars. “Petersen Museum” would be fine, he says. But “The Petersen” would be really cool.

Currently, there are no plans to commemorate Route 66 as it ran from Chicago to L.A. Nor build a special display of action vehicles from the Keystone Kops to Demolition Man. Only one small exhibit--of photographs and a silent loudspeaker--tell of a terminally endangered species: the drive-in movie.

“But we intend to cover everything from Plato to NATO,” Olson says. “You name the activity, and at some time we will have an exhibit on it.”

But maybe not the automobile’s darker sides. Although locally available, Charlie Manson’s golf cart likely won’t be displayed. Nor, if it could be located, the Porsche in which James Dean died.

Roth says these are areas where he “treads carefully.” That’s why the accident exhibit involves a car where driver and passenger walked away unscratched. Explains Roth: “We didn’t want to create a situation where somebody would wander in the museum, see the car and say: ‘Oh, my God. That’s the car Uncle Joe died in.’ ”

He has censored exhibit commentaries where sexist pejoratives, common among car lovers, were used. He also bleeped reminiscences about back-seat romancing.

“They don’t fit the G-rated nature of this museum,” Roth adds. “We’re going to get classes of fifth-grade kids in here, and that’s when it (a coarse comment) stands between entertainment and education and interrupts the process.”

Although director Olson believes five weeks after opening is too early for attendance analyses, he says the museum is “well on its way” to meeting a projection of “600,000 to 800,000 visitors a year.”

Raymond Walls, a retired piano and voice teacher, was among last week’s visitors. His vehicle was a wheel chair. Walls is 91.

“I’m fascinated by what I see here, but surprised by the black mannequins in the car showroom,” commented Walls, who is African American. “You know, I don’t think there were many black couples buying Auburns or Cords in Los Angeles in 1919.

“Not unless they were (cosmetic millionaire) Madame C.J. Walker’s people.”

How plead you, Mr. Curator?

Not guilty, Roth says.

His exhibit researchers went to the Afro-American Historical Society and checked that precise point. They found photographs of black couples driving cars in Los Angeles in the ‘20s.

“If they were driving them, we have to presume they were buying them from showrooms.” Roth notes. But Auburn showrooms in the 6000 block of Hollywood Boulevard? “Well, we are being a tad provocative.

“But by that single act (of including black mannequins) we are bringing up the changing nature of the urban community . . . causing an examination of the changing relationship between race, class and geography in Los Angeles.

“The way museums educate is by stimulating curiosity, making people ask their own questions.”

And by denying no trivia.