Was the Met Ever Actually Free?

Was the Metropolitan Museum of Art ever actually free? It's a fair question to ask on its Fifth Avenue steps. London's national museums have been free to enter since 2001, and Melbourne's National Gallery of Victoria has never charged for its collection at all. The Met sits rent-free on city land in Central Park, under a lease that promised free admission on most days of the week — and yet since 1970 the general public has had to pay something at the door, even if the something was a penny.

The paper trail runs from 1878 to a ticket desk today, and it doesn't settle as neatly as either side of the argument would like.

The claim: free land in exchange for free admission

The New York State Legislature chartered the Met on 13 April 1870, for purposes that included "furnishing popular instruction and recreation." The city then built its galleries in Central Park and, on 24 December 1878, handed them over on a perpetual, rent-free lease. Article Fourthly of that lease set out the public's side of the bargain:

That the exhibit halls of [the Museum] Building shall on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday of each week, and on all legal and public holidays except Sundays, be kept open and accessible to the public free of charge from ten o'clock AM until half an hour before sunset.

Free, in other words, four days a week and on holidays — not every day. The state then tried to go further. An 1892 law offered the museum up to $70,000 a year on condition that it stay open "free of all charge throughout the year." The museum objected that free access all week would be a financial hardship, and the legislature rewrote the deal the following year. The 1893 Act, which was never codified, kept the money and narrowed the promise:

...such further sum not exceeding $70,000, upon condition that the collections in [the Museum] shall be kept open and accessible to the public hereafter free of charge throughout the year for five days each week, one of which shall be Sunday afternoon and also for two evenings in each week.

That's the strongest form of the claim, and the one the museum's critics still cite: public land, public buildings and public money, in exchange for a public that didn't pay at the door.

What's actually documented: the 1970 bargain

By 1970 the arrangement had stopped working. Seventy thousand dollars was a nineteenth-century sum, the museum was running a serious deficit, and its director, Thomas Hoving, asked the Parks Department for permission to charge admission. On 7 October 1970 the parks administrator, August Heckscher, agreed — on conditions, the first of which was this:

The amount of the admission fee is left entirely to the individual's discretion and that advice to that effect be conspicuously posted.

It was meant to be a six-month experiment. In March 1971 Heckscher approved continuing it and asked the city's lawyers to draft a formal amendment to the lease. They never did; Hoving later explained that the exchange of letters had been judged sufficient on its own.

The wording on the wall mattered from the start. In 1975 the new parks commissioner, Edwin Weisl, passed on complaints that the museum's signs told visitors they had to contribute. Hoving's reply, dated 6 August 1975, didn't deny it: the signs read "Pay what you wish but you must pay something," and had done since the policy began. Some visitors, he wrote, insisted on their right to pay a single cent; most were more generous, and the average contribution ran between about 85 and 95 cents. Every later rise in the suggested price went to the city for approval, and the city kept approving — most recently before the lawsuits in a 2011 letter from the cultural affairs commissioner, Kate D. Levin, praising the museum's "continued commitment" to suggested admission.

The evidence against: the case in court

In November 2012 two Met members, Theodore Grunewald and Patricia Nicholson, sued the museum, arguing that the 1878 lease and the 1893 Act both required free admission. In March 2013 two visitors from the Czech Republic and a New York resident filed a class action on much the same grounds, adding that the museum's "recommended" $25 price misled people into thinking it was compulsory.

On 29 October 2013 Justice Shirley Werner Kornreich dismissed the claims built on the lease and the statute. The 1893 Act, she ruled, was an appropriations law: the state's remedy for a breach was to withhold the money, and private citizens had no right to sue under it. The lease was a contract between the museum and the city, and only the city could enforce it — and the city, which had approved the policy for more than forty years, had shown no wish to. She also put the practical point plainly: since a penny got you in, "Admission to the Museum is de facto free for all."

Eight days before her ruling, the city and the museum had settled the larger question themselves. On 21 October 2013 they signed an amendment to the lease giving the Met the right to charge a mandatory entrance fee, subject to city approval that "shall not be unreasonably withheld." The deception claims carried on and settled in February 2016: the museum agreed to call its prices "suggested" rather than "recommended" and to add the line "The amount you pay is up to you." The court gave final approval in June 2017.

2018: the fee becomes mandatory

The amendment was put to use within five years. On 4 January 2018 the Met announced that from 1 March, visitors from outside New York State would pay a mandatory $25, with $17 for seniors and $12 for students, while New York residents and students from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut would keep paying what they wished. The museum's case was arithmetic. By its own figures, 63 per cent of visitors paid the full suggested price in 2004; by 2018 only 17 per cent did. The change would affect about 31 per cent of visitors, and the Met's research said four in five of them were tourists from outside the tri-state area or overseas. The out-of-state price has since risen to $30 for adults.

The verdict

What's established is narrower than either side's slogan. The Met was never promised to be free every day: the 1878 lease made it free four days a week and on holidays, and the 1893 Act traded up to $70,000 a year for five free days and two free evenings. Since the autumn of 1970 the general public has had to pay something to enter — a penny would do — with the city's written approval at every step, and since 2018 visitors from outside the state have faced a fixed price.

What isn't settled is whether the 1893 Act still means anything. The 2013 ruling deliberately left open whether later funding laws, which say nothing about free admission, had superseded it; it decided only that a member of the public couldn't enforce it. The one party that could — the city — chose to rewrite the lease instead.

That's the real difference from London and Melbourne. There, free admission is public policy: in Britain a manifesto commitment, in Victoria simply the way the state's gallery has always worked. In New York it was a term in a contract between two parties, and two parties can renegotiate a contract without asking anyone else. The penny never went away. The Met's own admissions page still tells New York residents that the amount is up to them, but that they must pay something — almost exactly what Thomas Hoving's signs said in 1975.