Aerospace Museum one of Sacramento area’s first open-air exhibits to reopen amid coronavirus
Along with a growing list of businesses and indoor gathering places that now include places of worship, barbershops, indoor shopping malls and some dine-in restaurants, outdoor museums and art galleries recently got the go-ahead to reopen across California from the coronavirus shutdown.
In practice, reopening presents a logistical difficulty: many of the Sacramento area’s outdoor museum spaces are either linked to an indoor museum that’s still shut down, or they include physical equipment that would normally be shared by guests but now cannot be due to concerns for the highly contagious virus.
At least one museum is ready for takeoff, though. The Aerospace Museum of California at McClellan plans to reopen its outdoor museum space starting Thursday. It appears to be the first outdoor museum space in the Sacramento area to do so, at least among those requiring paid admission.
All staff, volunteers and visitors will be required to wear masks and follow social distancing guidelines at the 4.5-acre air park, which displays more than 35 historic aircraft, the museum said in a news release. Indoor museum space will be closed.
“The number of visitors will be limited to ensure plenty of room for everyone to move around safely and enjoy our Outdoor Museum and aircraft displays,” Tom Jones, the museum’s executive director, said in a statement. “We have missed the community and look forward to seeing them soon!”
Further information on guidelines and pricing are available on the museum’s website.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office has classified outdoor museums within Phase 2 of the statewide reopening plan, meaning they are considered to carry a lower risk for virus transmission. They’ve been allowed to reopen since mid-May.
Indoor museums and zoos, however, are classified by the state as “entertainment venues” that must wait until Phase 3. The distinction caused some confusion when Sacramento County health chief Dr. Peter Beilenson initially gave clearance to the Sacramento Zoo to reopen at the start of June, considering it an outdoor museum, before the state told the county to reverse course.
In Northern California, outdoor museums and art galleries hoping to reopen have had to contend with a brutal heat wave. Downtown Sacramento hit a record 104 degrees Tuesday, and is forecast to hit triple digits again Wednesday and Thursday. Temperatures are expected to calm to the low 80s by this weekend and early next week.
In addition to the McClellan museum, here’s the status of a few other notable outdoor museums in the Sacramento area.
▪ Fairytale Town on Land Park Drive in Sacramento remains closed until further notice. While the children’s attraction is largely an outdoor one, it contains a great deal of shared equipment that create health and sanitation concerns.
▪ The museum and parking facilities at Sutter’s Fort State Historic Park remain closed. According to California State Parks, the park itself remains open to local residents, but only for active exercise such as walking, jogging or biking.
▪ The California State Railroad Museum remains closed, including the handful of train cars exhibited outside the museum in Old Sacramento, which are normally open to the public free of admission.
▪ UC Davis has kept its campus arboretum, which its website lists as an outdoor museum, open to visitors for exercise walks over the course of the pandemic, but in-person events at the site remain canceled until further notice. The university’s chancellor and the arboretum’s executive director have urged six feet of social distancing from others visiting its pathways.
The university in a news release earlier this week sternly warned visitors to stop using rural parts of the UC Davis campus for recreational visits, noting that it “isn’t a park.” Citing recent damage to the Putah Creek Riparian Reserve habitat, destroyed bird boxes and snakes that appear to have been killed by humans since the beginning of shelter-in-place orders, officials are considering temporary parking limits to further dissuade visitors.
