A New Monday for the Met, Now Open Seven Days a Week

On March 30, 1880, the Metropolitan Museum of Art home on Fifth Avenue opened its doors to the public for the first time. It was a Tuesday, perhaps foreshadowing a feature of the modern Met. For the past 42 years, it has been closed on most Mondays.

That changed this week, when the Met opened its doors to visitors on a damp, muggy Monday morning. As of July 1, the museum is now open seven days a week.

The expanded schedule was long overdue, according to Harold Holzer, the museum’s senior vice president for public affairs. “Every Monday morning, whatever the signage said â€" and we tried putting it in red, like a red light â€" tourists would congregate at the bottom of the stairs,” Mr. Holzer said.

In recent years the Met had experimented with opening on holiday Mondays, and found the move to be a success. “Clearly, there was a yearning for more access to the Metropolitan Museum,” Mr. Holzer said. As of 2 p.m. on Monday there were 8,600 viitors, heading to a total of 10,000 to 11,000 for the day.

That’s “more than a typical summer weekday, less than a Memorial Day holiday Monday,” Mr. Holzer said. “We’re thrilled.” The Met receives about 6.3 million visitors a year.

Mondays at the museum had typically been devoted to maintenance and art handling, which makes the new seven-days-a-week schedule a logistical challenge. The Met hired a new operations manager, Bernice Chu, to oversee the effort and also added a few dozen security and admissions workers. To make time for moving artwork, which typically passed through public areas on Mondays, it has slightly cut back morning hours, now opening at 10 a.m. instead of 9:30. (“It’s only a half hour, but it adds up to three hours a week,” Mr. Holzer said.)

With visitors now arriving one extra day a week, local merchants are also likely to benefit. “It gives us the opportunity to work more,” Martin Diaz said in the middle of se! rving hot dogs at a concession stand in front of the museum. He also recently started working on Mondays in anticipation of the Met’s expanded hours.

Not all visitors to the Met on Monday knew about the changed schedule, but they seemed to appreciate it. Jean-Frédéric Hübsch, 31, a law student at McGill University in Montreal, was there with his mother. “She actually expressed surprise that it was open on a Monday, because years ago it never was,” Mr. Hübsch said. “If it had been closed, we would have found something else to do this morning.”

Others wanted to be there to mark the occasion, like Don Schwartz, 70, a retired history professor who was visiting from Seal Beach, Calif. “When I heard it was open on Monday, I said, ‘I got to do it.’”

Esther Loewengart, 61, who lives in Forest Hills, Queens, took two friends from California to see the Impressionist gallery on the second floor. She volunteered that she was “very enthusiastic” about the new schedule. She’sa member of the Met but often found it difficult to visit more than once a month.

“Monday is the day that I’m freest, and I always regretted that the Met wasn’t open on a day when I could actually take advantage of it,” Ms. Loewengart said. “I’m a psychotherapist, but it’s a day when I don’t see patients. So it’s my day, and now it’s the Met’s day as well.”