Autry officials estimate last year's Southwest Museum attendance at 40,000, about half of which was nonpaying youngsters in school groups. The Autry's Museum of the American West drew an estimated 165,000 visitors, about 50,000 of them students.
Autry officials say that they've already spent more than $5 million shoring up the Southwest's building and that they could end up spending an additional $15 million on replacing the roof and on seismic work, drawing heavily on state and federal grants.
The Los Angeles Human Relations Commission, nudged into the middle of this argument by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, has already held two public meetings to air museum leaders' plans and collect community input. A third meeting is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Thursday at Ramona Hall, 4580 N. Figueroa St.
The most dramatic of the seismic tasks is to reattach the Southwest's signature tower to the rest of the building. To do that, staffers must empty the tower, which has stored tens of thousands of artifacts for decades -- and it's those pieces that workers are moving from plywood cabinets into portable archival storage materials and freezing (to kill bugs). In months ahead, thousands of those displaced artifacts will be stacked in the Southwest's exhibit areas.
The destination of the collection, roughly 240,000 objects, is the core of the disagreement. Autry leaders plan to move many of the pieces to Griffith Park and exhibit them in about 20,000 square feet of space they hope to build adjoining the Museum of the American West there.
Back at the old Southwest building, which in recent years has devoted 8,000 to 10,500 square feet to exhibition, Autry leaders aim to cut that number to 4,500 square feet and devote the rest to nonmuseum uses, such as educational programs. It will be at least 3 1/2 years, Autry officials say, before the Southwest's Mt. Washington campus is fully open again.
"Two rooms do not a museum make," Possert said. "If you need more exhibition space, don't build it in a public park. Build it here."
In its battle, the coalition has gathered thousands of names on petitions, enlisted the aid of several neighborhood councils and struck alliances with dozens of organizations. The group has called for more specificity from the Autry on its plans for the Mt. Washington site, including the rarely used Casa de Adobe, a facsimile of a 19th century rancho also on museum property, and it urges Autry leaders to promise to maintain the site forever.
