New York City Art Museums Struggle During Reopening

Masked visitors stand outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Sept. 14, roughly three weeks after its initial reopening. Visitors have been reporting long lines and wait times of up to an hour before entering the museum, despite making the mandatory advanced ticket reservations. (Photo: Isabelle Bousquette)

After a six month closure due to the Coronavirus, museums started welcoming visitors back at the end of August, but with a few hiccups.

Ever since Governor Andrew Cuomo gave the green light to open at 25 percent capacity on Aug. 24, some of New York’s largest museums have struggled with how to accommodate visitor demand while maintaining social distancing restrictions. Long lines at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ticketing glitches on the MoMA web site, and visitors reserving tickets and not showing up at the Whitney are leaving museum goers frustrated and disappointed.

“It was really a nightmare,” said Daniella Ohad, a frequent museum goer. Ohad said she spent over an hour waiting to get into the Met on Sept. 10, despite making an advanced ticket reservation.

Visitor Experience Assistant Manager Darian Burrus says the Met has seen about 3,000–4,000 visitors a day (down from about 15,000–20,000 pre-COVID) since reopening on Aug. 29. However, that doesn’t mean a reduction in wait times to get in. On weekends, lines outside the museum extended down to 80th Street and up to 84th. During the first weekend of reopening, patrons were confused about which line to join. By Sept. 14, signs had been added to explain the purpose of each line.

MoMA limits capacity to 100 visitors per hour and a maximum of 700 per day. The museum releases tickets every Friday at 10 a.m. for the following week. However, the ticketing web site, which is run through the software company ACME Technologies, has repeatedly crashed. Anthony Nieves, a 22-year-old recreational therapist based in Connecticut, says he refreshed the page for two hours before he managed to book tickets. Tulani Bey, a recent college graduate of Lehigh University now living in New York, says she gave up after trying for thirty minutes.

At the Whitney, Senior Manager of Visitor Experience Meryl Schwartz says people are booking ticket reservations, and then not showing up. Time slots then appear fully booked on the website, deterring prospective visitors even though the museum is only at 20 percent capacity.

In 2019, nearly 11 million people visited New York’s four largest art museums, according to the annual survey of The Art Newspaper.