GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) – The Neville Public Museum has reopened following restrictions due to the coronavirus pandemic – but hours are now being limited because of other concerns.
The museum has reopened to the public, along with the featured Amazing Dinosaurs exhibit, with some caveats.
“We have special precautions outlined for how we can have people coming in safely,” says Executive Director Beth Lemke, “It was really exciting to be able to get permission to be able to open and have our patrons and our members and our donors see amazing dinosaurs because it is a really fantastic exhibit.”
Lemke says they’ve seen a lot of success over the past week with bringing in small groups and having everyone in the building feeling safe and comfortable with their surroundings.
However, other recent events have raised concerns for museum officials. Protests gone awry in Green Bay Sunday night saw store windows smashed and a gas station looted. That forced Brown County to look at the safety of employees that work in buildings around the vicinity of downtown Green Bay.
Those concerns also led to the museum moving certain artifacts awy from the first floor – and cutting down the hours.
“It’s really about personal safety, feeling safe, and then artifact safety…We did move some artifacts off the first floor and that were not ours just for that extra precaution, and we looked at some of our places where we could have potential risk,” Lemke tells WTAQ News, “We did have some loaned artifacts on our first floor that Brown County does not own, that are with other cultural institutions, and as an accredited museum it’s our job to make sure that while they’re in our possession, we treat them just as they are our own.”
Lemke hopes the museum can be a place for people and their families to find hope and healing – and some kind of peace for a while.
“It’s my hope that we can have that hope and healing, and we can have that conversation and that discourse. But also something we just can’t control – we can’t control going from a peaceful protest to something that turns a little bit different,” Lemke says.
The museum will close at 5:00 p.m. every day until next week, when staff will re-evaluate to see what the next week might look like. Lemke says patrons are still coming in and others doing online ticketing.
The current Amazing Dinosaurs exhibit runs through November 8th.
