In the neighborhoods around the museum, "the opinions are divided," said Carol Jacques, a veteran community activist who has lived on Mt. Washington for 23 years.
Jacques joined the coalition's negotiating committee, then left it, dismayed by the lack of compromises.
The coalition's demands were "a good starting point," Jacques said. "And many of us \o7are\f7 still afraid that they're going to take everything and run, and leave us with nothing. But I think we have to give Autry the opportunity to see what they can do.... We have to stop drawing lines in the sand, and take a step toward trusting."
If things go wrong later on, she added, "we can still organize. We can still boycott."
The Autry still needs to get city approval and raise money for the proposed expansion, but because the Southwest is a subsidiary of the Autry, nobody outside that institution has any particular authority over where it shows the Southwest's trove of baskets, blankets, arrows, dolls and other items, which is ranked among the best in North America.
From its beginnings, the Autry-Southwest relationship has been riddled with obvious and subtle ironies. The Autry is a young, relatively wealthy cowboy institution, founded in 1988 by the family of screen star and singer Gene Autry. The Southwest (formally the Southwest Museum of the American Indian) has from its origins in 1907 focused on native cultures, and it struggled with funding shortages for decades before the merger. (In fact, before the deal with the Autry was struck, the Southwest came within inches of an alliance with the casino-rich Pechanga tribe near Temecula.
Also, while the rest of Southern California remains steeped in NIMBYism, the Southwest's neighbors say they're fighting to keep the museum in their backyards.
And yet, among those raising their voices to question the Autry's intentions, coalition leaders can cite only one who has made a major donation to the Southwest, before or since its merger.
"Participating and caring can't just be talked about in terms of money," Possert said.
In their arguments, both Autry leaders and their foes make frequent reference to a rehabilitation study prepared two years ago for the Autry by Southern California preservation specialists Brenda Levin & Associates.
Possert notes that in the study, Levin concluded that in two different scenarios, a revived Southwest Museum would operate in the red but might be able to cover those losses through gifts and grants, as most museums do.
