National Trust for Historic Preservation: Return to home page

As the next significant and exciting step in our work to preserve the historic Southwest Museum Site, the National Trust team and our broad-based Steering Committee of experts have developed a detailed Request for Interest (RFI) with the property owner, the Autry Museum of the American West, to solicit innovative and thoughtful concepts that reactivate the Los Angeles landmark and icon of the Highland Park neighborhood as a community asset.

The RFI draws upon the careful community engagement, survey, and research we’ve conducted in the past few years to establish a set of fundamental criteria that we believe must guide any successful and sustainable approach to the property:

• Commitment –A clear commitment to preserving the historic structures and celebrating the history of the site and the legacy of its founder, Charles Lummis;
• Capacity – Demonstrate the organizational and financial capacity to undertake a project of this scale and complexity, and sustain operations over the long term;
• Community – Consider and reflect the priorities that have been expressed by the surrounding community, connecting the property and its uses to its neighborhood and greater Los Angeles; and
• Collection – Include opportunities for public programming that draws on the Autry’s historic Southwest Museum of the American Indian Collection.

Tours of the Southwest Museum campus , the Casa de Adobe and the Resources Center of the Autry will be offered in the next few months to allow all interested parties to see the sites and the collection first-hand.

We encourage a wide variety of ideas and welcome responses from major institutions to real estate brokers to local non-profits to community stakeholders. We hope you’ll submit your concept and encourage others to do so as well!

Questions about the RFI can be sent to the Autry and National Trust team at SouthwestRFI@theAutry.org. The deadline for responses to the RFI is June 10.

Danny Forrest, the Autry's Director of Capital Projects, and LeLena Lewark, the Autry's Senior Director of Collections and Conservation, provided members of the Steering Committee with an informative behind-the-scenes tour of the Autry's Resources Center on March 2nd. Steering Committee members Marshall McKay, Linda Dishman, Frank Parrello, and Christy McAvoy were in attendance, along with Stacy Lieberman of the Autry and me.

I had a chance to tour the Resources Center at about this same time last year and was amazed to see how much progress has been made on the facility since then. We viewed many of the rooms and the storage systems that have been designed to address the unique requirements of specific objects and collections, such as saddles, historic firearms, textiles, and archaeological objects.

The ceremonial gardens are still under construction, but when completed they will provide a separate and private space for tribal members to engage with the collection. Research rooms immediately adjacent to the large, main entry space will provide both public and private space for scholars, tribal members, the public, and researchers to learn from the collections and archives. And the new storage areas for the historic Southwest Museum of the American Indian collection have been completed. We were able to see the carefully-documented and conserved collection of hundreds of thousands of objects in the new spaces, waiting to be unpack by the conservation staff.

The Autry has offered to host a public tour of the Resource Center on Sunday, March 13th, for the Eagle Rock Historical Society and residents of Highland Park, Mount Washington, and other Northeast LA neighborhoods. If you are interested in participating in that tour, please contact the community representative members of the Steering Committee, Frank Parrello and Carol Teutsch, who are coordinating the tour with the Autry.