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The sounds of a small jazz combo crammed the Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Warm candles lit the area. Over at the museum’s American Wing Cafe, Christa Chiao and Anna Lee Hirschi have been sipping proseccos.
It was the first weekend of “Date Night” at the Met, an initiative to lure native guests back to the museum on Friday and Saturday evenings with two-for-one cocktails, gallery chats and free stay music that includes New Orleans jazz bands, Renaissance ensembles and string quartets.
The museum’s efforts to woo back guests from the area come as many New York cultural organizations fear not solely about the pandemic-era decline in tourism, but additionally about the persevering with wrestle to deliver back native crowds. The Met is at present attracting 62 p.c of the native guests it did earlier than the coronavirus pandemic, a change it attributes partly to the persevering with prevalence of distant work.
“In this new reality, where many outer borough residents are working virtually and do not have to come to Manhattan, it’s on us, on the cultural institutions, to be creative and proactive in finding ways to encourage local visitorship,” stated Ken Weine, a spokesman for the museum.
“The challenge that the Met faces,” he stated, “is really no different than a midtown small business.”
The Met is much from the solely arts establishment making an attempt to entice native guests back with deals as the Omicron surge fades and the coronavirus outlook appears to be bettering.
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Lincoln Center not too long ago introduced a brand new “Choose What You Pay” ticketing program for its American Songbook collection at the Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse, with a minimal ticket worth of $5 and a recommended worth of $35, in an effort to make its programing extra accessible.
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The Museum of Modern Art introduced this week that it might restart a program providing free admission to New York City residents on the first Friday of each month from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m.
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This 12 months, NYC & Company, the metropolis’s tourism company, prolonged NYC Broadway Week — throughout which theatergoers can get two-for-one tickets to most Broadway exhibits — for an extra two weeks, by means of Feb. 27.
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