L.A. STORIES : Cool and Collected : The Vaults of the Natural History Museum Prove What <i> Isn’t</i> on Display Is as Interesting as What Is

It is home to a piece of wedding cake from 1885, a suit worn by Thomas Jefferson (minus the BVDs) and so many embalmed insects that plans are afoot to create a traveling cockroach exhibit. Seriously.

Step inside L.A.’s biggest attic: a galaxy of warehouses, vaults and basement storage rooms that holds whatever isn’t on display at the county Natural History Museum. It is a mind-boggling chunk of Americana--half a million artifacts (including one kitchen sink) representing 450 years of the past.

That’s like someone squirreling away three items a day, every day, for five centuries. And you thought your closets were crowded.

Most of this collection, however, is fated to remain offstage. Some items are too fragile, others would be of little interest to non-scholars. But the main problem is logistical: The museum has space to display only about 5% of its holdings at any one time.

Our peek at the remaining 95% begins with an Imelda Marcos-caliber stash of shoes. Chief history curator Janet R. Fireman unfastens the first of many padlocks, dons a pair of protective gloves and rifles through drawer after drawer of footwear: From 1890s Berlin, the duck-billed platypus-shaped shoes of Crown Prince Frederick William; from the early 20th Century, Chinese silk slippers; from the 1935 movie “Top Hat,” Fred Astaire’s tap shoes, and, from the “novelty footwear” file, a pair of orange airline booties from the 1960s.

No Nike cross-trainers? Well, not yet, Fireman says.

“Until a few years ago, we had 1940 as our cutoff date. We’ve moved that forward because we recognize that what is current now will be historical later. The problem is, we can’t store everything, so we’re very picky in choosing.”

Thus, the man who offered to donate “clothing worn by Martians” was politely refused on the grounds that “we’re not supposed to collect anything from outside the U.S.”

Curators also rejected the “outer space object” that a woman said landed in her yard one night (it was an old light fixture).

But that doesn’t mean the collection is devoid of weirdness.

Take, for example, the box labeled, simply, “Billy Barty” (no, he isn’t inside; it turns out to contain his costume from the 1987 movie “Masters of the Universe”). Or the five-barreled “duck foot” pistol (“For group shots,” Fireman quips). Or that blob of 19th-Century wedding cake (one of very few items in the collection considered edible--in theory).

There also are wreaths made of human hair and several objects so obscure “we still don’t know what they are,” confesses Tom Sitton, museum social historian.

Of course, it wasn’t supposed to be this way.

Museum officials once had grand plans to get a handle on everything. They had begun cataloguing and crating the vast collection for transport to a centralized, state-of-the-art storage center. But budget and staff cuts have left the reorganization in disarray.

Hunting down artifacts for possible display in the new Petersen Automotive Museum took an average of 48 minutes per item, Sitton says. Many of the objects were stacked near the ceiling in a cavernous Vernon warehouse.

And in the costumes-and-clothing room--which contains everything from Oliver Hardy’s hat to a glove from “Planet of the Apes”--a closet labeled “U.S. Marine Corps” actually holds a medieval-looking armor chest plate and chain mail-type vest.

Not all is chaos.

The doll collection, for one, is laid out like some kind of miniature mausoleum. Some 2,000 tissue-wrapped Barbies, kachinas, Jiminy Crickets and Steiffs lie in state alongside boxes with such labels as “Straw Fetish Dolls,” “Standing Animals with Hooves” and “Animals with Paws.”

Although an all-doll exhibit might seem logical, Fireman says the museum prefers to use items “in context,” as part of regular historical displays with other artifacts from the same era. “People learn more when an object is in context than if it’s just a bunch of one thing,” she explains. “Our interest is to explain how people lived.”

Or how bugs lived.

The cockroach tour, which could become a beetlemania exhibit instead, will highlight some of the Natural History Museum’s 6 million insects. Also in the planning stages: a road show on cats. Deciding which items will be displayed can be difficult.

“People like the oldest, the first, the biggest and the best,” says Fireman. The museum’s 1830s banjo, for instance, is a magnet for scholars and musicians because it is thought to be the planet’s earliest five-string banjo.

But other famous curios have to be sidelined. Thomas Jefferson’s suit, which was on display for decades, went to storage in 1990 to protect it from the deteriorating effects of light.

In its stead is a meticulously fashioned duplicate sewn in Virginia’s Colonial Williamsburg.

“There’s always a conflict (when the artifact) is fragile,” Fireman says. “Do you put it on display so the public can see it or do you put out a replica? It’s a tough call.”

Another limitation is space. Although Natural History officials have the luxury of being able to farm out some artifacts to several satellite museums--the Page, the William S. Hart, the Petersen and the Burbank--there’s simply no way to display all this . . . stuff.

In addition to the historical artifacts and bugs, there are more than 10 million animal, fish and fossil specimens--ranging from a prehistoric crocodile skull to the foot bones of an ancient horse. Also in storage are roughly 1 million photographs, books and historical papers.

The overall collection is believed to be the third-largest in the nation, trailing only the Smithsonian Institution and New York’s American Museum of Natural History.

Other offstage items of note range from Spiro Agnew wristwatches to Chinese opium pipes. Some of the most intriguing artifacts, however, turn up in the weapons vault: rifle barrels made of bamboo and plumbing fixtures, gun stocks embedded with beads and coins, a palm pistol that looks like a tape measure, and campaign ribbons worn by Gen. George S. Patton Jr. (whose father was a Los Angeles County district attorney and land manager for Henry Huntington).

There also are 500 Colt revolvers--representing the evolution of the make--and scores of spears, swords and dragoons.

Are any of the weapons famous?

Well, not exactly.

“There is a gun that was owned by a member of the Dalton gang,” says curator emeritus Don Chaput. “But it’s the one he forgot at home before going out on the famous raid.”