The 9/11 Memorial & Museum in lower Manhattan is not for the faint of heart, with its oral histories of loss told by family members of those who died, photographs and videos of the catastrophe as it was taking place, and the displays of wreckage and found personal effects. Anyone with an interest in how the United States has changed since September 11, 2001 would want to start an investigation here. Making that less possible, however, is the $24 adult admission fee. Visiting the museum is free for 9/11 family members but, for the rest of us, the cost of entry is a sizable financial investment (for a family of four, two parents would pay $48 while their children ages seven to seventeen would be charged $15 apiece, or $78 in all), which may well deter some from going to this newly opened institution. Why create such a site, only to make the cost of visiting so prohibitive? For all museums, it is impossible to know who might have gone to the museum but did not (and why they didn’t), because surveys conducted at these institutions can only include the people who showed up. Still, the question roiling the museum world today remains: Does charging high admissions bring in more money to these institutions than is lost by those people who are deterred by the high cost of getting through the doors?

Going to a museum these days can be quite expensive, made more so by the recent