The Los Angeles wildfires that swept across southern California last week destroyed more than 30 historically significant structures, including museums, houses, and religious sites, according to the Los Angeles Conservancy, a nonprofit devoted to historic preservation.
“It is a mass erasure of heritage,” said the organization’s chief executive, Adrian Scott Fine, according to the Los Angeles Times. “We haven’t seen anything like this before.”
The former home of actor Will Rogers, located within Will Rogers State Park, the Zorthian Ranch artist colony, and the Andrew McNally House are among the notable properties razed during the wildfires. Notably, Los Angeles’s famed Getty Center and Getty Villa survived the Palisades Fire mostly unscathed due to protective architectural features.
“[The] staff and the collection remain safe,” Katherine E. Fleming, president and CEO of the J Paul Getty Trust, said in a statement. “Museum galleries and library archives were sealed off from smoke by state-of-the-art air-handling systems. The double-walled construction of the galleries also provides significant protection for the collections.”
Other, quirkier museums and archives, however, were less fortunate. The Bunny Museum, which housed thousands of rabbit-related artifacts, was lost. The owners, who plan to rebuild, released a statement to social media January 9 saying that it was “not a hoppy day today, but tomorrow will be hoppier.”
The Theosophical Library Center, which housed more than 40,000 texts on esoteric subjects like mysticism, alchemy, and scientific anomalies, is now “permanently closed” due to its destruction in the fires, according to the archive’s official website.
Kim Cooper, a co-founder of the Los Angeles-based Esotouric Tours company, described the archive as a representation of Southern California’s world-famous philosophical traditions.
“The cultural ideas that formed this visionary Southern California spirituality” were kept in the Theosophical Library Center, she told the Los Angeles Times.
Click through to see the notable and historic properties that were destroyed in the Los Angeles wildfires.
