Museums Los Angeles County

Members of the Railroad Museum in Lomita have launched their first major expansion project in decades by trying to raise $40,000 to build a 35-foot water tower. It is the first in a series of plans underway at the specialized museum to add three buildings and more exhibits at a cost of $5 million. "We are going to have quite an accomplishment when it is all done," said Alice Abbott , the museum's manager.

The giant puppets were the big hit--14-foot monsters wrapped in greens and golds that alternately thrilled and frightened the children crowding around them in the courtyard of the Getty Center on Saturday. The puppets, together with storytellers, musicians and hands-on crafts, were the extra attractions at the Getty's first Family Festival, which continues today.

Plans for a museum in Glendale that would house Native American artifacts belonging to actor Iron Eyes Cody have been scrapped, officials said Thursday. Parks Director Nello Iacono learned of the announcement from Cody's wife, who said the Codys are overburdened with charitable work. The museum would have been featured in an old one-story adobe building on historic grounds on Bonita Drive.

The J. Paul Getty Trust has hired the Boston-based firm of Machado and Silvetti Associates Inc. as master planners for the renovation of the Roman-style villa in Malibu that has housed the Getty Museum since 1974. The project will convert the facility into a museum and study center for classical antiquities. Construction will begin in 1997, after the opening of the Getty Center, a sprawling complex that is currently rising on a Brentwood hilltop overlooking the San Diego Freeway.

A bid to preserve the Antelope Valley's rich aviation history is taking flight near the Palmdale Airport as work begins on an attraction local officials hope will eventually draw thousands of tourists a year. The Plant 42 Heritage Airpark--celebrating the accomplishments of the Air Force's storied Plant 42--is expected to open in early October. With only two airplanes currently at the Avenue P site, it will be a modest debut.

A student intern at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History charged Tuesday that officials have disposed of part of the museum's collection of plant and bird specimens and that county workers have been ordered to work on remodeling the museum director's home. Sherri Gust made the charges during the public comment period of the weekly meeting of the Board of Supervisors. Museum Director Craig Black was on vacation Tuesday and unavailable for comment.

Pierce College will soon begin converting a portion of the school's farm into an agricultural museum, President Mary Lee said. Volunteers are being sought for an Aug. 12 work party to renovate old chicken houses and other structures to hold the museum, she said. The Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History in Exposition Park, she said, has donated an old wagon, a thresher, a bean planter and a portable cattle chute.

In the not-too-distant past, Long Beach's waterfront meant the rundown Pike amusement park, honky-tonk bars, seedy Navy dives, even a Pussycat Theater. In those days you didn't mix Long Beach and culture in the same sentence. But all that is long gone, and the city, capitalizing on the opening of the $117-million Aquarium of the Pacific, is ready for its own coming-out party.

Not long ago, a veteran art museum director had an epiphany about the state of his profession. Arriving at a meeting of the Assn. of Art Museum Directors, he spotted his colleagues from a distance. He was looking at some of America's most highly revered and well-seasoned cultural leaders, but what he saw was a group of overweight, out-of-shape, gray-haired men in rumpled business suits. Ann Philbin, the director of the Drawing Center in New York, who on Jan. 11 will succeed Henry T.