George C. Page - The La Brea Tar Pits

The La Brea Tar Pits

Page had begun visiting the La Brea Tar Pits while in his late teens; it troubled him that to move from pits to the disinterred fossilized remains required a seven-mile trip to the Natural History museum. A half-century later, the museum that bears his name was opened to the public in April 1977. Page had devoted great care into each element of the museum—attractive fossil presentation, so it would not simply be "bones, bones, bones"; testing the most comfortable underfoot surface—carpet, not marble—and limiting the museum to exhibits that could be easily covered in about an hour. Among the site's visitors—five million in its first decade—were professional curators interested to see what Page, as an amateur, had put together. ""The thing that made me feel awfully good," Page told the Los Angeles Times in 1982, " was that they said, 'George Page, we have never been in a museum with things displayed so well.'"

Page described The George C. Page Museum as a kind of living bouquet he'd presented to the city: "This is so living, so immediate. It's like giving flowers that I can smell while I'm still here."