courtesy middle american research institute courtesy middle american research institute
Fair and Field Above: A replica of the Uxmal Maya temple constructed at the 1933 World’s Fair was one of Blom’s major triumphs. Below: Blom is seated at the head of a table at the real Uxmal site.
reconstruction of the Nunnery from the ruined Maya city of Uxmal. Blom receives a $7,500 grant to take a team of artists, architects and engineers to the Yucatan to collect information to assist in the reproduction. Along the way, his team makes several important archaeological discoveries. While the completed reproduction at the site of the World’s Fair falls short of Blom’s ambitions (officials deem Blom’s plans too expensive and order him to reproduce only a single façade of the Nunnery), public reception is positive. “Blom estimated that about seven million people visited the building and its museum displays, which originated from the department’s collections,” writes Berman. The idea that the public could be so interested in archaeology and Middle America takes root in Blom’s imagination, and he conceives a plan to recreate the Nunnery as the new home for the Department of Middle American Research on Tulane’s campus. “For the remainder of the 1930s,” writes Berman, “Blom attempted to gain support for this grandiose scheme.” During this same time, Blom submits to the university’s administration a plan to expand the department, creating 10 divisions, a staff of 30 persons and an operating budget of more than $200,000—perhaps not the most strategic of ambitions in a world slogging through the Great Depression. Blom’s ideas fail not only to attract support from either inside or outside the university but, according to Berman, are considered “fanciful and unrealistic.” When his plans for the Nunnery encounter opposition from the university’s trustees, Blom proposes an alternative structure: a full-scale replica of the temple pyramid at Chichén Itza. The structure is designed to be 200 feet in width and 104 feet tall, containing five stories on its interior. Historian John Dyer, in Tulane: The Biography of a University, suggests that the buzz on campus was that “the goings on upon the fourth floor of the science building (present-day Dinwiddie Hall) smacked of the esoteric and crackbrained.” Blom, however, seems oblivious to the pushback. “He constantly hammered the administration with requests for a major fundraising drive to erect his headquarters,” writes McVicker. Significantly, Blom no longer travels to Mexico on expeditions, exchanging adventure for what Brunhouse calls the “mundane details” of being a departmental administrator.
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