Price of Success : Balboa Park Museums to Restrict Access on Free Tuesdays

Mobbed by thousands of San Diegans and visitors taking advantage of once-a-month free admission, Balboa Park museums next month will begin asking visitors to line up for a chance to view the exhibits on the first Tuesday of the month, a park official said.

Attendance at some park museums rises twenty-fold on free Tuesdays, creating a fire hazard and ruining the experience for many visitors, said Chris Fontana, vice chairwoman of the Central Balboa Park Assn. The association has asked the museums to enforce waiting lines in order to limit the visitors allowed in at any one time.

On a typical summer weekday, 3,188 people pay admission to the five Balboa Park museums surveyed by her association, Fontana said. But the numbers soar to 24,958 when admission is waived on the first Tuesday of the month, the survey found.

Last month, visitors lined up three-deep in front of the Natural History Museum exhibits on the free day. “Horrendous is a good word to describe that,” said Hal Mahan, the museum’s director.

From that August high of more than 13,000 visitors, attendance declined to 5,000 Tuesday, Mahan said. But the record came in the summer of 1988, when 20,000 people walked through the two-level exhibition area in a single day.

“You put 20,000 people in the space that we have, and it becomes difficult to move around,” Mahan said.

If a museum needed to be evacuated on a free Tuesday, “we would have had pandemonium,” Fontana said. “I went to the Museum of Natural History last month and couldn’t get through the door. . . . It was wall-to-wall people.”

Concerns about public safety forced the change in the open-door policy, museum officials said.

Beginning next month, museums will begin enforcing limits set by the San Diego Fire Department on the number of visitors allowed in at one time, Fontana said. And, although that may force some to wait in lines, it will allow visitors a better look at the exhibits once inside, she said.

Schools and camps, unaware that admission to their groups is free anytime at most of the museums, have contributed to the problem, Fontana said. “On the free Tuesday in August we had busloads of day-camp kids coming in,” she said.

Other frequent free Tuesday visitors are large families priced out of the park museums, officials said. “By the time you take your kids to several museums, you have spent $100, if you count the food,” Fontana said. “So many of them come on the free Tuesdays.”