The Petersen Automotive Museum announced Tuesday that one of its founding benefactors, Margie Petersen, has donated buildings, collectible cars and cash with a combined estimated value of $100 million.
"We're all just absolutely ecstatic," said Buddy Pepp, executive director of the museum at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue, across from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Pepp said the cash component is "many, many, many millions of dollars" but won't be disclosed at the request of Petersen, widow of Robert E. Petersen, the car magazine publisher and former Hollywood publicist who spearheaded the museum's creation in 1994 and saved it with a $25-million donation in 2000.
"I am thrilled to make this gift which continues what Mr. Petersen and I began two decades ago," Margie Petersen said in a statement released by the museum. "I am so happy that this day has come and that I can launch the museum into a new era of growth and expansion."
Without owning them, the museum previously had free use of the museum building and adjoining parking garage, as well as the 135 vehicles that are part of the gift, said Pepp, a former firehose manufacturer who has been active as a museum supporter since the beginning and 10 months ago became its second director, succeeding the retired Dick Messer. The newly gifted autos join about 250 others, plus more than 50 motorcycles, that had made up the museum's collection.
The cash from Margie Petersen comes with a requirement that the museum raise an undisclosed matching amount. Recently its annual budgets have been in the $4 million to $5 million range, with attendance averaging about 150,000 a year. Pepp said the museum will now hire its first staff of fundraising specialists as it launches a campaign to build an endowment, and over the next two years will more than double its board from the current seven members to 15, which figures to further increase its fundraising firepower.
The most visible near-term changes, Pepp said, will be a thorough sprucing-up of the museum's interior and changes to the exterior aimed at bolstering its street presence.
