Opinion: Don't move the mammoths at La Brea Tar Pits (via latimesopinion)
My favorite photograph of the La Brea Tar Pits was taken in 1910, before it was in any way recognizable as what it would become. In the foreground, not far from what is now Wilshire Boulevard, a cluster of men stand in front of a small tar pond. Behind them, oil derricks rise against the backdrop of the Hollywood Hills.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about this image in the five weeks since the unveiling of three proposals for renovating the tar pits and the Page Museum. Much of the response to the plans has revolved — anxiously — around the family of fiberglass mammoths that have played out a kitschy life-and-death drama for more than half a century along the shore of the Lake Pit at the corner of Wilshire and Curson. One redesign would relocate them indoors.
The fiberglass mammoth family is meant to trigger our most sentimental impulses. It’s a melodrama in three dimensions: One creature stuck and bellowing, two others — including a baby — in distress on the shore. But the context isn’t wrong. The appropriate fossils have been pulled from the tar, and the Page Museum has the dark-stained remains that prove it. The tableau is entertaining fakery, reconstituted history and a science lesson all rolled into one.
Balancing that divide drives the mission of the Page Museum, which, Lori Bettison-Varga, president and director of the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County, told me recently, “is one of the few museums in the world that has to be where it is.” What she’s referring to is the Page’s ongoing work of fossil excavation and preparation.
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