Philadelphia's Benjamin Franklin Parkway is the brand new home for the Barnes Foundation museum of impressionist and post-impressionist art. Surprisingly, it was a scary place to visit on Monday night, June 25. The museum has extremely tight security, as the home of an estimated $25 billion dollar fantastic collection of 181 Renoirs, 69 Cezannes, 59 Matisses, 46 Picassos and so on. Just before 6:00 PM, the museum guards informed visitors (I was one of them) that the galleries were closing, directed us to an elevator and told us to go to the first floor. However, the elevator door would not open on the first floor and the elevator returned back up to the gallery. The guard insisted that we stay in the elevator and go back to the first floor. An angry patron in our elevator yelled out at the security guard, demanding to talk with a manager. Finally, the guard relented, let us out of the elevator and allowed us to walk down the stairs which deposited us behind a large locked metal gate, partitioning off a foyer where Wilmington Trust was hosting a private party. After some conversations among the guards, one of the guards unlocked the gate and allowed us to traverse across the cocktail party (which looked like a lovely affair), and led us to the museum's front foyer.
The exit doors to the outside were locked! For a period of about 10 minutes a revolving parade of about 4 or 5 different museum staff and guards, presenting a variety of what appeared to be electronic passes or fobs, were unable to unlock the exit doors. As people muttered and milled, I wondered: What if there were a fire? What if the angry man in the elevator riled up other people and the crowd began to press against the door? (unlikely among such a museum-going crowd, but panic leads people to do strange things). Where were the alternative exits? Were they locked too? As a resident of Rhode Island, which is still grieving the deaths of 100 people, and 230 more injured in the Station Nightclub Fire in 2003, I had to wonder. Does the Philadelphia Fire Department know that the Barnes locks people in? That there are no operable fire exit doors? Does its insurance underwriter know?
After a security guard successfully figured out how to open the door to release the museum-goers, we filed outside and passed a snaked line-up of Wilmington Trust cocktail party guests patiently waiting to get in. Fortunately, it was a lovely, uneventful evening and probably nobody cared.I really hope that they figure out a way to protect the valuable art collection inside without putting people's lives at risk.
(photo, copyright Barnes Foundation)