The Southwest Museum is now officially a “national treasure.” That’s a booby prize. The National Trust for Historic Preservation so designates only those revered monuments slipping into obsolescence or financial embarrassment. (Shown, the SWM’s main exhibition hall c. 1914 and in 2013.)
The Trust has 55 national treasures, a quirky selection that includes few if any predictable tourist attractions. They embrace Nashville’s Music Row, the Manhattan Project site, and—the only other “treasure” in L.A.—a complex of vintage industrial buildings at the Port of Los Angeles. That’s a treasure only Lewis Baltz could love.
Will the designation help the SWM? It can’t hurt. The problem remains money. Everybody wants the SWM to be preserved and to retain a public function, ideally as a museum. No one—not the Autry Center, the Highland Park community, city and county government, or Westside billionaires—seems ready to write a check. It’s said that it would cost $26 to $41 million to renovate the building—and more for programming it, for course.
The language of Tierra del Fuego contains the word mamihlapinatapai, meaning “looking at each other hoping that either will offer to do something that both parties desire but are unwilling to do.”
