In the Getty Villa’s gardens Friday morning, a light breeze and the splash of fountains punctuate a peaceful quiet; there is no hint of the construction below on Pacific Coast Highway. Nearly six months after the Palisades wildfire scorched 23,000 surrounding acres, decimated thousands of nearby homes, and damaged much of the museum grounds, the Los Angeles landmark is open again.
It is a moment of joy for staff and visitors, tempered by the continuing recovery outside the museum walls. Alexandria Sivak, an assistant communications director for the Getty, expresses “a solemn understanding that we are surrounded by many homes that did not make it through the fire … while at the same time feeling very grateful that we remain standing.”
Visitors to the museum’s reopening echo that gratitude.
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The Getty Villa Museum, a cultural touchstone in LA, escaped major damage from wildfires. Its reopening gives recovering Angelenos, and others, something to smile about.
“To come here and experience this shows that there’s life and there’s beauty and there’s still art to experience here,” says Phil Sky, who worked on the villa as a carpenter about 20 years ago.
Oil magnate J. Paul Getty built the Roman-style villa more than 50 years ago as a monument to classical art and architecture. It houses tens of thousands of Greek, Roman, and Etruscan antiquities. The gardens offer beauty and tranquility overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Olive trees, fennel, and purple artichoke thistles grow in an herb garden filled with Mediterranean plants. Around the corner, the outer garden’s sitting areas encircle a sparkling reflecting pool outlined with perfectly trimmed hedges, and walled in by frescoed landscapes of the Italian countryside.
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“I don’t feel like this is LA,” says Mr. Sky. “I’m walking through Europe or some other country as I go through here.”
During the Palisades fire, artwork was safe inside the buildings, which were designed to withstand heat and flames. But “there was stress and nervousness in the operation center as we were watching fires spark up surrounding the campus,” says Ms. Sivak. The fire consumed more than 1,400 trees on the property and left soot and ash blanketing the site.
This is Robyn Kranzler’s first visit to the museum, even though she grew up in nearby North Hollywood. “I’m blown away. I didn’t know it was so beautiful here,” she says.
The professional runner lives in Wisconsin now, and hasn’t been back in nearly four years. The extent of the area’s fire damage is shocking, she says, and the villa provides an important break from the political and social upheaval going on in the world. “It’s so easy to get caught up in all the here and now. … And having something like this just kind of reminds you that there is a lot more.”
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Lee Holtz lives in New York, but spends a lot of time in Los Angeles. He was here during the January wildfires. In a “landscape of impermanence,” the museum is remarkable for enduring, he says. “This is the survivor of an earlier and in some ways grander civilization. So that’s symbolic in all kinds of ways.”
The thought that it might not survive the next disaster got Heather Fuller to drive up from Orange County, south of Los Angeles. She had planned to visit in January, but the fires kept her away.
She’s happy the villa is open, she says, and hopes “it symbolizes that everyone else who is affected will be able to get back to their lives as well.”
