5:29 p.m. August 28, 2020 modified at 6:48 p.m. August 28, 2020
Cultural life in New York is picking up slowly, but differently, due to the Covid-19 epidemic that has hit the United States since the spring. Most of the “Big Apple” museums are reopening, starting with the Metropolitan Museum, the largest museum in the country with seven million annual visitors, and a host of masterpieces by Dürer, Raphaël, Rembrandt, Monet, Van Gogh, among 2 million rare pieces. After nearly six months of closure, the Met will welcome the public again on Saturday, August 29 (it already welcomed museum subscribers during a pre-opening this week). The Met Cloisters Museum (featuring four medieval cloisters and collections of medieval objects) will only open on September 12.
Only 25% attendance per day
As in major museums in France, wearing a mask and booking online will be mandatory at the Metropolitan. Agents will take visitors’ temperatures at the entrance. Attendance will be limited to 25% of that in normal times (20,000 visitors per day).
The teams mostly expect New Yorkers and New Jersey residents, while before the pandemic, 70% of the public attending the museum were foreign tourists. Met management also believes that many of these local visitors will prefer to come by bike rather than public transport. A bicycle parking service with “concierge” was set up this weekend for these New York art-loving cyclists. The first 500 of them to park in the museum’s “plaza” will even receive a bicycle reflector with the Met …
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