The Bunny Museum, home to 46,000 items of rabbit-themed memorabilia, has been destroyed in the fires spreading across Los Angeles. Described last year as the ‘weirdest, wildest place you can visit in Los Angeles’, the museum was established in 1998 by husband-and-wife Candace Frazee and Steve Lubanski in Altadena. More than 5,000 structures have burned down in the neighbourhood, and 100,000 residents evacuated, since fires broke out on 7 January.
The museum’s collection focused on consumer culture from the past half-a-century, including stuffed toys, artworks, Christmas decorations, Easter eggs, snow globes and advertisements. In an interview with the Guardian in 2021, Frazee estimated the collection to be worth $1.9m and dated the oldest item to 300 BC. The museum also included a ‘Chamber of Hop Horrors’ showcase that focused on the ‘abuse’ of rabbits throughout history, from laboratory experiments to lucky rabbit foot keychains, and even the appropriation of the bunny’s image by Playboy.
Despite their best efforts to protect the museum through hosing the exterior down with water throughout the night, the couple reported on social media that it caught fire on 9 January after the building next door began to burn. ‘We saved the first bunny and the second bunny of the collection,’ Frazee told the Los Angeles Times. ‘Gifts to each other. We saved the antiquity items, three framed Guinness World Record certificates and the Elvis ‘Parsley’ Presley water pitcher. We lost our wedding albums, my wedding dress and 46,000 bunny objects.’
As Frazee put it: ‘It’s not a hoppy day.’
