African-American history museum the hottest ticket in D.C.
The hottest ticket in Washington, D.C., right now? It’s for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, where thousands of tickets are snapped up each month within minutes of being released, a full seven months after the museum opened.
The 750 passes released online each day at 6:30 a.m. are gone within 15 to 30 minutes. When 105,000 tickets were released April 3 for visits in July, they were all claimed in just over two hours.
The next batch of reserve-ahead tickets will be released Wednesday at 9 a.m. and a similar demand is expected. “We thought the numbers would abate but they have not,” said the museum’s deputy director, Kinshasha Holman Conwill.
In addition, she said, the museum’s “dwell time is off the charts.” Typically people spend 45 minutes to two hours visiting a museum, but “many of our visitors spend four to six hours. Then they say, ‘There’s no way I can see this in one day, I’m coming back.’”
Abby Kavner, a UCLA professor, got her sameday tickets on an April trip to Washington by going online exactly at 6:30 a.m. and pressing “buttons like a maniac” until she got through. It “felt like I won the lottery,” she recalled.
The 300 same-day walk-up passes handed out onsite each day at 1 p.m. also usually disappear within 15 minutes.
The museum has suspended accepting new requests for group tours because of a backlog. More than 25,000 group tour requests have been processed, but another 30,000 requests were pending as of Feb. 28.
Attendance from the museum’s Sept. 24 opening through April was expected to exceed 1.5 million once all data is compiled. Projections suggested the museum would get between 1.7 million and 2.6 million visitors during its first year.
“We’ve never seen anything like it,” said Linda St. Thomas, spokeswoman for the Smithsonian Institution, which has 19 museums and galleries under its auspices. “We knew it was going to be very popular because of the subject and its location at the foot of the Washington Monument. But interest has not dwindled. We are still at capacity almost every day.”