Founded in February 1997, the J. A. Cooley Museum is a 10,000-square-foot private collection on Park Boulevard in Hillcrest covering the American Industrial Revolution and early automotive history. The museum’s Industrial Revolution documentation runs deeper than display labels, with reference files on early American manufacturing that complement the local-history archive at the Mission Hills-Hillcrest/Knox Branch Library a few blocks west. The car gallery features more than two dozen vehicles from 1886 to 1933 — including the 1885 Benz, the only-one-in-existence 1910 Hunt Special, a 1981 DeLorean DMC, and the 1994 Buick XP2000 concept car. Beyond the cars, 40-plus categories of antique collections — phonographs, cuckoo clocks, over 2,000 cameras, license plates, cast-iron toys, and model trains — sit alongside the kind of vintage material-culture inventory found at neighborhood shops like Mid Century Store. The most involved visits are docent-led tours through the full 10,000-square-foot space, covering the Edison Victrolas, the working Nickelodeon, the complete 1914-to-1991 California license plate run, and a guided sit at the pre-war automobile gallery.