Lonnie Hammargren's house

I spent much of the afternoon doing something that can be done only one day a year: touring the home/museum of Lonnie Hammargren. Who is Lonnie Hammargren, you ask? Well, he's a neurosurgeon, former Lt. Governor of Nevada, former NASA flight surgeon, and honorary Consul to Belize. He's also the #1 collector of Nevada memorabilia--as well as collector of everything else. I mean, it's hard to fashion much of a connection between Nevada history and an actual 1815 Venetian gondola, but he has one (reputed to be the third-oldest gondola in existence).

I took a ton of photos. It would have been way too much work to upload them here, because the Blogger interface requires doing them one at a time (unless there is some batch process that I haven't discovered yet), and it would make this page too slow to load anyway. So I did something new: I created an account on Flickr and posted them there. Wow--that's a great site. Took no more than 2 minutes to set up the account and mount the pictures. I just love user-friendly interfaces!

See all the photos here. Read more about Hammargren here. See his own web site here.

I cannot sufficiently stress that you should make an effort to tour this place once in your life. Make your next trip to Vegas on Halloween weekends, not only because Vegas is highly entertaining on Halloween, but because October 31 happens to be the day that Nevada attained statehood, and either on that day or on a weekend near it is the only time that you can traipse through the Hammargren house.

It is impossible to describe to you either the sheer size or the incredible weirdness of everything. He has three lots with three houses all connected together, then roof and roofs on top of roofs, and inside the houses are at least a dozen different staircases leading to various internal levels (and at least a couple leading to nowhere, I discovered), with stuff crammed everywhere. There must be a thousand building and fire code violations on that property. Some places seem structurally unsound, but it's all so damn weird that you feel compelled to traverse rickety stairs, jiggling walkways, clear acrylic floors, overcrowded scaffolds, and every other manner of structural connection in order to poke around in it all.

You can take a "virtual tour" of the place on Hammargren's web site, but it's not the same, because you can't see things up close. It's better than nothing, though.

A few themes emerge from the chaos. Clearly the man is enamored with space and astronomy and NASA (for God's sake, he has what appears to be a functioning planetarium in his house, complete with seating for maybe 50 people!), Howard Hughes, boxing, Nevada history and casinos, U.S. presidents, religion, musical instruments, trains, medical history, Belize, Egypt, and movies. But even after accounting for hundreds of items in those categories, there remains the vast majority of, well, crap that just doesn't seem to have any organizing theme or purpose, other than, I suppose, that they are things that caught Hammargren's fancy at some point, and he either bought them or they were donated to him. Trust me--the pictures I posted constitute maybe 10% of what is there. You just can't imagine the sheer volume of far-out, completely inscrutable stuff that the man has accumulated over his lifetime. Why is there an Abraham Lincoln statue immersed in a plexiglas tank of water, surrounded by sea creatures? Why is a New York skyline replica next to an Aztec stone engraving, which in turn is hanging over a Chinese sculpture, next to a collection of 19th-century pharmaceuticals? Nobody knows. But there it is.

Vegas is the strangest city in the United States, maybe in the world. And of all the strange sights the city has to offer, I'm pretty sure that Lonnie Hammargen's house is the strangest. You really, really shouldn't miss it.