Added to the National Register of Historic Places on March 4, 1975

The enterprise of the Natural History Museum is an absurdly ambitious one: to educate the public about the entire history of the natural world, from the Mesozoic age to today. You can see reconstructed skeletons of dinosaurs that went extinct 66 million years ago, and taxidermied versions of mammals and birds you can still find in the wild today. You can walk among spiders and butterflies in the outdoor exhibits and nature gardens; see the largest gold nugget ever extracted in California, and meteorites dating back 4.6 billion years in the Gem and Mineral Hall; learn about LA’s underwater past, and the people and the events that made Los Angeles what it is today. 

Between this facility and the two other institutions managed by the Natural History Museum – the La Brea Tar Pits and the William S. Hart Museum – they hold 35 million specimens and artifacts, the largest natural and cultural history collection in the western United States. The scope of this museum is truly astounding.

And to think, the Natural History Museum wouldn’t exist were it not for drinking, gambling and rabbit chasing. At the turn of the 20th century, the 30-acre Exposition Park that now hosts the Museum was a fairground called Agricultural Park, operated by the Sixth Agricultural District Association of California. These folks put on annual festivals where one could imbibe freely at two saloons, carouse with the local prostitutes, watch car races or cheer on greyhounds as they chased rabbits around a track, maybe bet on the outcome if you were so inclined. Some accounts say that there was camel racing, too. Sounds like a pretty good time, but definitely not a place to take the family.

One day in the late 1890s, a local attorney and Methodist Sunday school teacher named William M. Bowen found some of his students wandering among the drunken revelers at Agricultural Park, and decided it was a moral hazard. After Bowen was elected to the LA City Council in 1900, he made it his mission to push legislation that outlawed the unsavory activities at Agricultural Park. He joined with some similarly upstanding locals to ensure that the land wouldn’t pass into private hands, and after a decade of court cases, the California Supreme Court declared the park public property in 1908.

The next step was to turn the park into a wholesome cultural center to be proud of. They solicited private subscriptions, and convinced the city, county and California state governments to help develop the project. The state agreed to build an exposition center for California products (now the California Science Center), plus a National Guard armory (now the Wallis Annenberg Building); the community funded the museum, and the city agreed to pay for maintenance costs on the grounds. It’s the same agreement that exists today. 

Local architects Frank Hudson and William A.D. Munsell were hired to design the museum. They envisioned a building that was classic-looking, yet eclectic in style. Witness the Romanesque brick exterior, contrasting with the rich ornamentation and terra cotta trim typical of Spanish colonial architecture; or the faux-marble Corinthian columns in the rotunda, reminiscent of ancient Greek architecture. All based on European Beaux-Arts traditions, capably synthesized. It’s not dissimilar in style to the LA County Coroner’s Office, also a Hudson and Munsell design.

Ground was broken in July of 1910, and at the cornerstone laying ceremony on December 17, William Bowen’s daughter Mary formally rechristened the grounds as “Exposition Park” (W. Bowen apparently refused the offer to name the park after him). By November 1911 the museum’s Board of Governors had hired its first museum director, Frank Daggett, and by mid-1913, the museum had negotiated the rights to excavate the La Brea Tar Pits. This arrangement would yield many of the Ice Age mammal fossils that were a centerpiece of the Museum’s collection until 1976, when they moved to the new George C. Page Museum next to the Tar Pits. The Natural History Museum finally opened to the public on November 6, 1913.

Much of the Museum’s original collection was provided by the organizations represented on its Board of Governors: the Historical Society of Southern California, the Cooper Ornithological Club, the Southern California Academy of Sciences and the Fine Arts League.

That’s right, fine arts! The original name of the museum was the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science and Art. It housed a fine arts collection up through 1965, when the art department spun off on its own as the LA County Museum of Art, and moved to its new building on Wilshire Boulevard.

The Natural History Museum of 1913 was much smaller than the current building. Visitors from 1913 through 1930 would enter through the eastern doorway, nearest the rose garden, where they’d be greeted by the jaw-dropping rotunda, with its walls of gleaming Italian marble, gorgeous “Three Muses” statue by Julia Bracken Wendt, and a 20-foot skylight by famed stained glass designer Walter Horace Judson (who also designed the glowing globe held aloft by the muses). From there, they’d wander into one of three wings jutting off from the rotunda, each one devoted to either history, science or art. 

In 1925, the Museum spent nearly $1 million to triple its available exhibit space, including the room that houses the North American Mammal Hall. It expanded again in 1930, adding a southern doorway that currently serves as the main entrance, plus the African Mammal Hall and the central atrium with the iconic “Dueling Dinos” exhibit. 1960 saw the addition of a new west wing housing the Jean Delacour Auditorium. And there have been plenty more additions and changes since, including the airy Dinosaur Hall that opened in 2011, and the Otis Booth Pavilion on the north side, a six-story-high glass cube dominated by a fin-whale skeleton that dives from the ceiling. More changes are afoot: in recent years the west wing was demolished to make way for the NHM Commons project, set to open in fall of 2023. 

The National History Museum opened during a time of incredible cultural and technological achievement. The day before the Museum’s opening, William Mulholland made his famous remark “There it is – Take it” at the opening of the first Los Angeles Aqueduct (there’s a story that the armory at Exposition Park was christened with a bottle of water from the Owens Valley). The Panama Canal was opened in 1914, and the following year the influential Panama-California and Panama-Pacific Expositions took place in San Diego and San Francisco, respectively. It’s encouraging to know that an institution that had its roots in a cultural and industrial boom from over a century ago is still finding new ways to teach Angelenos about our past. 

PRO TIP: the Natural History Museum is free to visit for LA County residents from 3-5 pm, Monday through Friday. It is always free for California teachers, CA EBT cardholders, USC students and faculty, active or retired military, and children 2 and under.

Sources & Recommended Reading

+Natural History Museum’s NRHP nomination form

+The NHM Story (nhm.org)

+”Turning an Odor of Sin Into the Smell of Roses” (Los Angeles Times, 1995)

+”Death Takes W. M. Bowen” (Los Angeles Times, 1937)

+Opening New Doors to Natural History (NHMLAC.org)