Museum of Popular Art

This guide to the Museum of Popular Art in Mexico City follows this Art Deco firehouse from decades of ladder trucks and sleeping firemen to its closure in the 1980s, and the damage the 1985 earthquake left unrepaired for a decade. It traces the story of artisan Pedro Linares, who said a fever dream in the 1930s showed him monsters stitched from other animals, the alebrijes, and how architect Teodoro Gonzalez de Leon restored the ruined building before it reopened in 2006. Historians still can't agree whether Linares's story is true.