For Kids, Car Nuts and Connoisseurs

Although visitors to the museums in the Miracle Mile area can see everything from a miniature French palace to the gas pump of the future, directors say the attraction is not cars or dolls but people: how they live and what they dream about.

The Petersen Automotive Museum chronicles the development of the car and its effects on lifestyles, architecture, entertainment and about everything else in Los Angeles. Director Richard Messer is a self-professed car guy, but he says you don’t have to be one to appreciate the museum.

“We’re getting a lot of non-car people,” Messer said. “People are sending their parents.”

Visitors wander over a fake roadway and can take a whiff of the authentic smells emanating from the display of an early auto garage. If they don’t want to peer inside an antique car, they can peek through the windows of a Depression-era luxury car showroom or a replica of the famed Dog Cafe in Culver City.

The Museum of Miniatures is also attracting a diverse audience, from World War II veterans who remember driving a Sherman tank like the one recreated in a battle scene to teen-agers drawn to “Garage Art” figures. One of those is a Skull Warrior, a fanged beast swinging skulls on a chain.

“They’re really gruesome,” said museum owner Carole Kaye. “We have something for everyone.”

More to her taste, she said, are the miniature Roman banquet hall, the tiny wooden chest with 6,000 pieces of inlay or the replica of a Hollywood Bowl performance by Louis Armstrong.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is not only the oldest and most notable of the Miracle Mile museums, it’s considered by some the finest general-interest art museum west of the Mississippi River, said Wally Weisman, a member of the board of trustees.

The collection ranges from the pre-Columbian era to contemporary art, including Japanese and Far-Eastern art, Indian art, collections of 19th-Century American and European paintings, mosaics, photography and a sculpture park.

In the future, the museum plans to expand its educational programs into the old May Company building west of the museum, Weisman said.

The George C. Page Museum of La Brea Discoveries displays thousands of fossils of saber-toothed cats, mammoths, camels, snails, birds, plants and “La Brea Woman,” all of whom met a sticky death in what later became known as the tar pits. (It would be little consolation for them to know that they actually died in pools of asphalt, not tar.)

During the summer, visitors can also have a peek at Pit 91, where scientists and volunteers are continuing to unearth 30,000-year-old fossils. And if they’re not careful they can plant their shoes in the asphalt that continues to bubble through the sidewalks outside.

The Craft and Folk Art Museum is scheduled to reopen in March, 1995 after renovations are completed on its building. The museum collection includes Mexican folk art, Japanese textiles and African and European crafts--the stuff of everyday life from cultures represented in Los Angeles, said director Patrick Ela.

“We try to stress the commonality between cultures, the universality of these objects people use for living,” he said.