The New York Transit Museum is expanding its opening hours at its decommissioned subway station in Downtown Brooklyn starting in July, while adding more time for people to browse its smaller gallery space at Grand Central Terminal this month, amNewYork Metro can exclusively reveal.
The beloved exhibit space home to a fleet of vintage subway train cars will be open four days a week from Thursday–Sunday instead of the current three on Friday–Sunday, and will welcome visitors an hour earlier at 10 a.m. as opposed to 11 a.m., starting July 7.
Tickets are still timed to half-hour slots and museum members will now get first dibs on the earliest entry time between 10 a.m.–10:30 a.m. as part of a pilot program the organization is testing out.
The popular nostalgia train rides also returned earlier this month, and the next two slated for July 10 to Coney Island and Aug. 13 to the Rockaways have already sold out.
The popular museum closed for 18 months due to the pandemic and reopened its turnstiles with a pared-back schedule last August. Its director said staff decided to add more hours of operation after several sold-out days this spring and as more visitors are likely to come back over the summer.
“We feel like the time is right for us to expand, the earlier months of the summer are pretty busy for us,” Concetta Bencivenga told amNewYork Metro in an interview. “We wanted to really capture that time as people perhaps are visiting more from out of town.”
The museum stayed closed for longer than other cultural institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic, in part due to its confined underground space inside a 1936 subway station and because it’s highly popular with children, who weren’t eligible for the vaccine as early as grownups.
The transit history buffs pivoted entirely to virtual programming for the first year-and-a-half of the coronavirus outbreak, and the online offerings will continue as they have become a favorite for patrons from around the world, Bencivenga said.
However, the museum remains best-known for its stable of meticulously-restored antique subway cars that visitors can walk through.
“One of the things that makes the Transit Museum so special is the fact that our most priceless and irreplaceable objects are things that you can actually go and sit in and you can get that very immersive experience,” said Bencivenga. “I think immersive Van Gogh is pretty cool, but an immersive 1904 wooden-framed subway car is actually pretty cool too.”
The Transit Museum used to be open six days a week and counted 700,000 visitors in 2019, but the earlier days in the week were mostly filled with school trips, which have yet to return. Bencivenga said they will consider reopening more days if classes of pupils come back this fall.
“As school trips become, hopefully they reemerge as something that is back on the table for a lot of the schools in the city, we will be delighted to expand our hours again to accommodate those students and teachers,” she said.
The Grand Central gallery and store will expand opening days from Wednesday–Friday, 11:30 a.m.–6 p.m., to Tuesday–Saturday for the same hours, and the space has seen increased footfall as more people travel through the Midtown transit hub, according to Bencivenga.
A year into the pandemic, the museum, which is part of the state’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority but run by a separate non-profit, laid off 24 staff members, about a third of its 66-strong pre-COVID workforce, the New York Post reported.
Bencivenga and a museum spokesperson did not provide the current number of workers, but the director said they would hire more people as they operate longer and have more visitors coming to see the exhibits.
“We want people to have a great experience and you need adequate staffing to do that,” Bencivenga said.
Recent numbers are still less than a quarter of what they were pre-pandemic, with 58,628 visitors from January through May across all venues — including online programming – compared to more than 237,000 for the same period in 2019.
“That is really what is leading the conversation,” Bencivenga said. “As we need to add critical positions, we absolutely will do that.”
New York Transit Museum, 99 Schermerhorn St., at Boerum Place in Downtown Brooklyn, (718) 694–1600, www.nytransitmuseum.org. $10 ($5 kids and seniors). Open Thursdays–Sundays, 10 a.m.–4 p.m. starting July 7. Advance tickets and masks required.
The Grand Central Gallery and Store is located just off the main concourse in the shuttle passage, adjacent to the Station Masters’ Office. Free. Open Tuesdays–Saturdays 11:30 a.m.–6 p.m.
