Plan

A third-floor nonprofit that has taught letterpress and binding since 1974, with a free gallery at the front and the presses running behind it. Shows change every couple of months.

Mon to Sat, 11am to 6pm. Closes 5pm Friday and Saturday

A large gallery on the block between Tenth and Eleventh, free to walk into, with a bookshop two doors down at 535 that keeps the same hours. Shows change every several weeks and there is no admission and no ticket. You can be through it in fifteen minutes or stay an hour, and nobody minds either way.

Tue to Sat, 10am to 6pm. Closed Sunday and Monday

Three converted 1920s warehouses on West 22nd, run by the Dia Art Foundation, showing one long commission at a time rather than a rotating program. Admission is free. The scale of the space is the point and a single work will often take the whole floor, which makes it a short visit unless you want a long one.

Wed to Sat, noon to 6pm. Closed Sunday to Tuesday

Pace built itself a tall purpose-made gallery on West 25th and kept two older spaces at 508 and 510 on the same block, so there are usually several unrelated exhibitions running at once within a hundred feet. Entry is free, the lifts are signed, and the upper floors are where the larger installations go. It sits in the gallery blocks between 24th and 26th.

Tue to Sat, 10am to 6pm. Closed Sunday and Monday

Paula Cooper opened the first gallery in SoHo in 1968, with a show to benefit the committee trying to end the war in Vietnam, and moved to Chelsea decades later. The main space has been at 524 West 26th since 2018. The program still runs to conceptual and minimal work. Free, and usually quiet enough to hear the floor.

Tue to Sat, 10am to 6pm. Closed Sunday and Monday

Free fashion museum inside the Fashion Institute, two gallery floors that turn over a few times a year.

Wed to Fri, noon to 8pm. Sat, 10am to 5pm. Closed Sun to Tue

A museum on Park at 70th built around the Rockefeller family's Asian art collection, with changing exhibitions alongside it. It is small enough to see before a show, and admission is free on Fridays. Closed Monday and Tuesday and shuts at five the rest of the week. There is a café on the ground floor if you want to sit down afterwards.

Wed to Sun, 11am to 5pm. Closed Monday and Tuesday. Free admission on Friday

Frank Lloyd Wright's spiral on Fifth at 89th, where the building is as much the visit as the art in it. Take the elevator up and walk down the ramp, which takes about as long as you want it to. Tuesday and Sunday between four and half past five is pay what you wish at the desk. It closes at half past five every day, so it is a daytime stop with no exceptions.

Daily, 10:30am to 5:30pm. Pay what you wish Tue and Sun, 4pm to 5:30pm

Henry Clay Frick's mansion on 70th Street, holding the paintings he bought, hung in the places he hung them. It reopened in April 2025 after a two hundred and twenty million dollar renovation that opened the family's second floor to visitors for the first time and added an auditorium. It is small enough to see properly in an hour and a half, which is the reverse of the problem the Met has.

Wed to Sun, 10am to 6pm. Closed Monday and Tuesday

The building runs a quarter of a mile along Fifth Avenue and holds enough that nobody sees it in a day, which is the right way to treat it before a show. Pick one wing and leave. New York State residents pay what they wish at the desk rather than the posted thirty dollars, which is not advertised much. It stays open until nine on Friday and Saturday and is shut all day Wednesday.

Thu, Sun, Mon and Tue, 10am to 5pm. Fri and Sat, 10am to 9pm. Closed Wednesday

John Bowne's house, where he let Quakers meet in 1662 in defiance of Peter Stuyvesant's ban and was deported to Holland for it before the Dutch West India Company sided with him. Nine generations of one family lived here and the furniture and kitchen hearth came with them. Tours run forty-five minutes and you buy the ticket at the door.

Wed, noon to 4pm, with tours at noon, 1pm, 2pm and 3:15pm. Extra Saturdays on the events calendar

The oldest place of worship in New York City still used for its original purpose, built in 1694 and extended in 1716. It is a plain shingled building with wooden benches and no decoration, set behind a burying ground on Northern Boulevard, and the Quakers who meet here trace back to the 1657 Flushing Remonstrance. It was made a National Historic Landmark in 1967. Tours follow the Sunday meeting or go by appointment.

Sunday worship at 11am with tours after, around noon. Weekday visits by appointment only, arranged about two weeks ahead

The only comprehensive art collection in Queens, about six thousand objects held on the fourth floor of Klapper Hall at Queens College. It runs from ancient Egyptian and classical material through prints by Dürer and Rembrandt to twentieth-century work, and it mounts changing shows alongside the permanent holdings. Admission is free. It keeps university hours, which means weekdays and the academic calendar.

Mon to Thu, 10am to 4pm. Closed Fri, Sat and Sun, and closed during college recesses

Lewis Latimer drafted the patent drawings for Alexander Graham Bell's telephone and patented the carbon filament that made the light bulb last, and this Queen Anne house is where he lived from 1903 until he died. It was moved here from its original site to save it from demolition. The permanent exhibition is on the ground floor and admission is free.

Fri and Sat, 11am to 5pm

Built starting in 1694 and the oldest house of worship still standing in New York State, with a plain interior of benches and no decoration, the way Quaker meeting houses are built. It has been in continuous use by Flushing Friends for more than three centuries and became a National Historic Landmark in 1967. Visitors are shown round for half an hour after Sunday worship.

Open for tours Sun, noon to 12:30pm. Worship at 11am. Group tours other days by appointment

The concourse ceiling is a night sky painted backwards, which nobody caught until after it was finished, and there is a dark patch left unrestored near Cancer so you can see what seventy years of tobacco smoke did. Down the ramp outside the Oyster Bar the tiled arches carry a whisper diagonally across the corner. Free, and open until two in the morning.

Daily, 5:15am to 2am

The old Mid-Manhattan branch across Fifth Avenue from the lions, gutted and rebuilt in 2021 as the largest circulating library the system has. Open reading floors stacked up the building, a long central stair, and on the seventh floor a roof terrace with seats and a view north up Fifth. Everything is free and nobody asks why you are there.

Mon to Thu, 8am to 9pm. Fri, 8am to 8pm. Sat and Sun, 10am to 6pm

Known as the Little Church Around the Corner since 1870, when a nearby parish refused to bury an actor and sent the family here instead. It is built low and rambling like an English village church, set back behind a lychgate with a garden in front, and the stained glass inside includes a window of Edwin Booth as Hamlet. The garden is open in daylight and costs nothing.

Garden open daily in daylight. Church interior Mon to Fri, 9am to 4pm, and Sunday between and after the morning services until about 3pm

Pierpont Morgan's private library of 1906, three tiers of walnut shelving behind brass grilles, with a ceiling painted to look like a Renaissance vault. His study next door still has the red silk on the walls. The newer galleries change shows every few months and there is a glass-roofed court in the middle with a cafe in it.

Tue to Thu, 10:30am to 5pm. Fri, 10:30am to 8pm. Sat and Sun, 10:30am to 5pm. Closed Monday

Coney Island USA runs the museum and the Circus Sideshow out of a 1917 building on Surf Avenue, and it is the only organization here that treats the neighborhood's own history as its subject. Upstairs holds banners, carousel animals and parts of rides that no longer exist. Downstairs a sword swallower and a fire eater work a continuous show you can walk into partway through.

Museum, Sat and Sun noon to 6pm. Circus Sideshow, Sat and Sun 1pm to 9pm. Weather dependent and quieter off season

The oldest continuously operating aquarium in the country, on Surf Avenue since 1957 after seventy-odd years in Castle Garden at the Battery. The walk-through shark building and the sea lion pool are the parts people come back for. It is the one indoor cultural stop in Coney Island that is open every day of the year, which matters in January.

Daily, 10am to 4:30pm. Free admission after 3pm on Wednesdays with a timed ticket

Rutgers-Newark runs this on the second floor of the old Hahne and Company department store, reached through an atrium that opens onto both Broad and Halsey. Inside are the Paul Robeson Galleries, the SHINE Portrait Studio and a video production studio, and everything is free. The current exhibition cycle is built around Blues People, after the Newark-born LeRoi Jones.

Mon to Sat, 8am to 9pm. Closed Sun. Individual gallery and studio hours vary

New Jersey's largest museum, on Washington Street behind Military Park, with American painting, a Tibetan collection and a period house attached. Admission is ten dollars, eight concessions, and free if you live in Newark or study at a university here. On the third Friday of the month it stays open to nine.

Thu and Fri, noon to 7pm. Sat and Sun, 10am to 5pm. Open to 9pm on the third Friday of each month. Closed Mon to Wed

The main library faces Washington Park from a limestone front laid in 1899 and dedicated in 1901, designed by the Philadelphia firm Rankin and Kellogg and on the National Register since 1978. The ground floor runs rotating exhibits out of the city's own collections, and Philip Roth's personal library is on display. Anyone can walk in and sit down without a card.

Mon, Tue, Thu and Fri, 9am to 5:30pm. Wed, 9am to 8:30pm. Sat, 9am to 1:30pm. Closed Sun

A film archive with two screens in the old Second Avenue Courthouse, bought in 1979 and converted by the architects Raimund Abraham and Kevin Bone. Jonas Mekas was among the founders in 1969 and the programming still runs to avant-garde work and restored prints. Most screenings start in the evening.

Screening-dependent. The box office opens ahead of the first film, which is usually early evening

A 1926 building that opened as the Yiddish Art Theatre, with a Star of David set into the domed ceiling and Moorish plasterwork around it. It has shown films since 1992 and both the interior and the exterior were designated city landmarks in 1993. Seven screens now, and the largest one is the original auditorium.

Roughly daily, 11am to 10pm, with screening times setting the day

A former factory converted to artist lofts in 2005, now four floors of galleries and studios diagonally across Bogart Street from the L entrance. Slag Contemporary, Studio 10 and Momenta Art all have space inside. Walking the hallways costs nothing.

Hours vary by tenant. Most galleries open Thursday through Sunday, roughly noon to 6pm.

A sixty-seat cinema behind a bar and kitchen at the Morgan Avenue L, showing repertory cult titles and new independents for ten dollars a ticket. Table service runs through the film. The bar side keeps going after the last screening starts.

Monday to Thursday 5pm to midnight. Friday 5pm to 2am. Saturday 3pm to 2am. Sunday 3pm to midnight.

Ride up past the fifth floor and the escalators turn to ash and oak, the last working wooden ones anywhere. They have been carrying people since the 1920s and they still creak.

Roughly daily, 11am to 9pm. Confirm before a late arrival

The old Farley post office sorting floor, reopened in 2021 under a glass roof. Kehinde Wiley set a stained glass ceiling over the 33rd Street entrance and Stan Douglas lined the walls with staged photographs of a single day in the old station in 1957.

Daily, 5am to 1am

Franciscan friars have handed out breakfast on this sidewalk every morning since 1930, through storms and through the Depression that started it. Inside, the lower church stays quiet all day and costs nothing.

Weekdays, roughly 7am to 6pm. Weekend Mass schedule only

A first-run and repertory cinema on Metropolitan Avenue, open since 2011 in the shell of the old Charles Theater, with food and drink brought to the seat during the film. It still runs 35mm. Matinees start in the late morning on weekends.

Mon to Fri 3:30pm to 11pm. Sat and Sun 10:30am to 11pm. Showtimes posted weekly on Tuesday

A small museum of New York objects that started as a street-facing window display in an apartment and became a storefront on Metropolitan Avenue. The collection runs to subway tokens, Statue of Liberty souvenirs, seltzer bottles and a shrine to Jackie Robinson. Admission is a few dollars and the whole visit takes half an hour.

Fri to Sun noon to 6pm. Closed Monday to Thursday

A non-profit art center on ten acres off South Greenbush Road, founded in 1947 by a group that included Aaron Copland and Helen Hayes, and moved out from a Nyack storefront in the 1950s. The indoor exhibitions change through the year and are always free. Behind the building, the Catherine Konner Sculpture Park puts rotating work across the grounds and is open dawn to dusk seven days a week, whether or not the galleries are.

Mon to Fri, 10am to 5pm. Sat, 10am to 4pm. Closed Sun

The hamlet's library on Strawtown Road, open to anyone who walks in. There is a reading area, public computers and a program calendar that runs most weeks. Borrowing needs a card, but sitting down with what is on the shelf does not. It stays open to 9pm from Monday through Thursday.

Mon to Thu, 9:30am to 9pm. Fri and Sat, 9:30am to 5pm. Sun, 1pm to 5pm

Four screens on West Houston showing new independent and foreign films alongside a repertory program of revivals and restorations. It is the only autonomous nonprofit cinema in New York and it has run since 1970. The schedule turns over constantly, so there is usually something on that is not playing anywhere else in the city.

Every day, 12:30pm to 10:30pm. Open every day of the year

A five-screen cinema in the old Waverly Theater building at Sixth Avenue and West 3rd, running new independent releases alongside a midnight series on Friday and Saturday. The midnight slot is the reason to know about it, because almost nothing else in the neighborhood programs that late. Tickets are sold at a street-level box office.

Mon to Thu and Sun, 10:30am to 10:30pm. Fri and Sat, 10:30am to 12:30am. The box office opens 15 minutes before the first screening and closes 20 minutes after the last one starts

A Victorian Gothic courthouse from 1877 that became a branch library, with a clock tower whose fire bell still strikes the hours from 9am to 10pm. The reading areas sit under the old courtroom windows and anybody can walk in. The garden alongside it occupies the site of the jail that used to stand there.

Library: Mon to Thu, 10am to 8pm. Fri and Sat, 10am to 5pm. Sun, 1pm to 5pm. The adjoining Jefferson Market Garden keeps irregular volunteer hours, most reliably Tuesday and Thursday mornings from mid-April through September

A volunteer-run regional history museum in the Kingsland House, a few streets off Route 17 in Rutherford. It keeps permanent displays on the Meadowlands alongside rotating and traveling exhibits, and admission is free with a donation box by the door. It is small, and it opens on most Saturdays only, from ten until four.

Most Saturdays, 10am to 4pm. Closed the rest of the week

Fifty-odd murals wrap the warehouse walls, roll-down gates and loading docks on Troutman Street either side of St Nicholas Avenue. It started in 2012 when one resident offered his wall and then talked his neighbors into offering theirs. Most pieces get painted over inside a year, so the block you walked last spring is not the block you walk now.

Outdoors and free at any hour. Daylight is what you want

Two fieldstone buildings on a Lighthouse Hill slope, built in the 1940s to look like a Himalayan monastery, holding one of the larger collections of Tibetan art in the western hemisphere. There is a terraced garden with a lotus pond behind them and a view down to Raritan Bay. Admission is ten dollars and it is open Wednesday to Sunday afternoons only.

Wed to Sun, 1pm to 5pm. Closed Monday and Tuesday

A hundred and thirteen acres off Richmond Road, opened in 1740 and still the oldest working cemetery on the island, with two freshwater lakes, three bridges and fifty-one miles of path. Richard Morris Hunt built the Vanderbilt mausoleum into the hillside here in 1886 and Frederick Law Olmsted laid out the ground in front of it. The gates are open to anyone during the day.

Daily, 8am to 5pm. 8am to 6pm July and August. Office Mon to Fri, 9am to 3pm

A two-story Georgian house built around 1750 on East Jersey Street, now run as a museum by the State of New Jersey. Elias Boudinot lived here from 1772 and was president of the Continental Congress while he owned it. Alexander Hamilton stayed with the Boudinots in 1772 while he was at Elizabethtown Academy, and Jonathan Dayton bought the house in 1795 while he was speaker of the US House. It is a National Historic Landmark and the guided tour takes about an hour.

Mon to Fri, 9am to 5pm. Closed Sat and Sun

William Livingston built this house in 1772 and became New Jersey's first governor two years later. It stayed in one family until the 1990s and is now run by Kean University, which means the contents are the family's rather than a curator's reconstruction. The house tour runs about an hour and caps at fourteen people, and the grounds cover twenty-three acres you can walk for a small fee.

Tue to Sat, 10am to 3pm. Closed Sun and Mon

A warehouse on Union Street fitted out with ten regulation shuffleboard courts and a Florida retirement-village paint job. You sign up for a court at the desk or you stand at the bar and watch other people play. A food truck parks inside and does the cooking. Sundays are the one day they let all ages in.

Mon, closed. Tue to Thu, 6pm to 11pm. Fri, 6pm to 1am. Sat, noon to 1am. Sun, noon to 8pm

Two screens on Ludlow Street running 35mm prints and repertory programming, open since 2016. There is a bookshop selling film titles and a candy counter off the lobby. The Commissary alongside it does dinner and is modelled on the old studio canteens.

Screening times set the day and the box office opens ahead of the first film. The Commissary runs Wed to Sun, 5pm to 10pm, and is closed Monday and Tuesday

A free gallery in a corner building on Courtlandt Avenue that shows documentary photography and film, most of it about the Bronx or about places the Bronx came from. It runs classes for local teenagers alongside the exhibitions. The space is small enough to see properly in half an hour.

Thu and Fri, 3pm to 7pm. Sat and Sun, 1pm to 5pm. Closed Monday to Wednesday

José Manuel Soto, who everyone called Chema, and his neighbors cleared a dumped-on lot at 158th and Brook in the late 1970s and built a casita on it, a small Puerto Rican country house with a garden around it. The lot it sits on now is its second city-owned site. There is a stage, planting plots, chickens, an outdoor kitchen for lechón asao and a workshop where instruments get built and repaired. Los Pleneros de la 21 came out of this yard.

April 1 to October 31 only. Wed, 9am to 11am. Fri, 4pm to 6pm. Sat and Sun, 1pm to 4pm. Closed through the winter

A museum on the Grand Concourse that has been free to everyone for years, with a collection built around artists of African, Asian and Latin American descent and artists who have worked in the Bronx. The South Wing is shut for a renovation the City has put more than forty million dollars into, so what is open is the North Wing. Exhibitions turn over a few times a year and the building closes between them.

Wed to Sun, 11am to 6pm. Closed Monday and Tuesday. Admission free for everyone. Shut for an exhibition changeover from September 7 to October 8, 2026, reopening the evening of Friday October 9

A Victorian Gothic cottage on the shore at Rosebank where Alice Austen lived and made around eight thousand photographs of New York between the 1880s and the 1930s. The house shows her work and tells her story, including the decades she spent there with Gertrude Tate. The lawn runs down to the water with the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge on one side and Lower Manhattan on the other, and the grounds are free and open even when the house is not.

House, Tue to Sun, 11am to 5pm, closed Monday. Grounds open daily until dusk. Admission suggested at five dollars, three for students and seniors, free under twelve

The New York Public Library's largest Bronx branch, a four-story building on East Kingsbridge Road with an auditorium, a gallery wall, a teen floor and the Bronx reference collection. It is open until nine four nights a week. There are tables with power. A public restroom is inside, and it costs nothing.

Mon to Thu, 9am to 9pm. Fri and Sat, 10am to 8pm. Sun, noon to 6pm. Individual floors keep shorter hours, with the concourse level 11am to 5pm

The small wooden farmhouse Poe rented in 1846 for three dollars a month, where his wife Virginia died and where he wrote Annabel Lee and Eureka. It was moved across the Grand Concourse into Poe Park in 1913 and the Bronx County Historical Society runs it for the Parks Department. The park around it has a 1925 bandshell and a visitor center, and that part is free and open whether the cottage is or not.

Thu and Fri, 10am to 3pm. Sat, 10am to 4pm. Sun, 1pm to 5pm. Five dollars, three concession. The Society asks you to book a time by phone or email. Poe Park itself is free and open daily

A theater inside Restoration Plaza that opened in May 1972 as part of the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, the first community development corporation in the country. It reopened after a renovation with music and dance added to the play schedule, and film alongside them. In summer the plaza outside runs free jazz and soul.

Box office and lobby follow the performance calendar. The plaza outside is open during Restoration Plaza business hours

The old Brooklyn Historical Society building on Pierrepont, now run by Brooklyn Public Library, with terracotta ornament outside and a panelled reading floor upstairs. The ground-floor galleries are free and you can see them without an appointment. It sits one building away from St. Ann & the Holy Trinity.

Wed to Sun, noon to 5pm. Closed Monday and Tuesday

Arturo Schomburg's collection became a New York Public Library division in 1925 and the building at 135th and Malcolm X has been the anchor of it since. The exhibition galleries are free and open to anyone who walks in off the street. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2017 and is marking its hundredth year.

Mon to Sat, 10am to 6pm. Closed Sun. Individual research divisions keep their own hours

The museum spent seven years in temporary quarters while its new building went up on the same block of 125th Street, and it opened the doors there on November 15, 2025. Seven floors by Adjaye Associates, with a ground floor that reads as part of the sidewalk. Admission is a suggested amount rather than a fixed price, and Sunday is free.

Wed, Thu and Sun, 11am to 6pm. Fri and Sat, 11am to 9pm. Closed Mon and Tue

The museum occupies part of the old Astoria Studios complex on 35th Avenue, where Paramount shot silent pictures before the industry moved west. The core exhibition is hands-on, with a recording booth where you dub dialogue over a film clip and cases of cameras, costumes and props. Thursday afternoon admission is free. There is also a 267-seat theater that programs its own screenings.

Thu, 2pm to 6pm. Fri, 2pm to 8pm. Sat and Sun, 11am to 6pm. Closed Mon to Wed

Free to walk into. The Polonsky exhibition holds a Gutenberg Bible and Jefferson's own copy of the Declaration, and the marble staircase justifies the stop by itself.

Mon to Sat, 10am to 6pm (Thursday to 8pm). Sun, 1pm to 5pm

The oldest building in the Bronx, a Georgian fieldstone house Frederick Van Cortlandt began in 1748 on land his family had farmed since 1691. Washington and Rochambeau both used it during the war. You tour it yourself rather than on a guide's schedule, and it is five dollars, or nothing on a Wednesday.

Wed to Sun, 11am to 4pm, self-guided. Five dollars adults, three students and seniors, under-twelves free, and free for everyone on Wednesdays

The chapel at Broadway and Fulton went up in 1766 and is the oldest public building still in continuous use in Manhattan. It stands under a hundred yards from where the towers fell and came through undamaged, then spent nine months as the place recovery workers slept and ate. The pew scarred by their equipment is still inside, along with a cross forged from World Trade Center steel.

Open to the public 8:30am to 6pm on weekdays and Saturday, Sunday until 4:30pm. There is a security check at the door

Eight acres in Barrett Park in West Brighton, opened in 1936 and best known for a rattlesnake collection that was considered the most complete in the country when it was assembled. It is small enough to do properly in ninety minutes, with an aquarium, a reptile wing and a children's farm. Adults are ten dollars and children six, and nothing about it requires booking.

Mon to Sat, 10am to 4:45pm. Adults ten dollars, children six

The New York Public Library's branch for this part of the east Bronx, on Glebe Avenue a block off the square. It is a place to sit down with free wifi and a bathroom in a neighborhood that does not have much of either, and the Bronx local history shelves are worth ten minutes on their own. Closed Sunday and shut by five on Friday and Saturday.

Mon and Wed, 11am to 7pm. Tue and Thu, 10am to 6pm. Fri and Sat, 10am to 5pm. Closed Sunday

The museum occupies the decommissioned Court Street station, and you reach it down a set of subway steps on the corner of Boerum Place and Schermerhorn. Downstairs on the platform sit around twenty restored subway cars from 1907 onward that you can walk through and sit in, with the period advertising still in the frames. Admission is ten dollars for an adult and five for a child or a senior. It is closed Monday and Tuesday and shuts at 4pm, so it only works for an afternoon plan.

Wed to Sun, 10am to 4pm. Closed Monday and Tuesday

A working laundromat on Manhattan Avenue with a bar and sixteen pinball machines behind a door built into a dryer. The machines run from Medieval Madness to current tables and take quarters. Beer is sold on the far side and the wash cycle keeps running on the near side.

Daily, 8am to 2am

A block of 37th Road closed to cars in 2012 and turned into the public square of Jackson Heights, with seating, planters and the 74th Street station at one end. The businesses around it run a Business Alliance that programs the space, and it carries melas, momo crawls, parades and vigils through the year. On an ordinary afternoon it is people sitting with chai and a phone. It costs nothing and there is no closing time.

Open at all hours as a public plaza

Three floors of a 107th Street townhouse hung with the Himalayan paintings of Nicholas Roerich, who designed the sets for the premiere of The Rite of Spring. Admission is free and there is rarely anyone else inside. The museum also puts on free chamber concerts in its own parlor.

Tue to Fri, noon to 4pm. Sat and Sun, noon to 5pm. Closed Monday

A five-screen cinema on Metropolitan Avenue that opened on March 10, 1927 as the Metropolis Theatre and calls itself the oldest continuously operated independent movie theater in Queens. The screens are small, between thirty-six and seventy-one seats, with digital projection and recliners put in during the last refit. The program mixes the week's releases with independent and specialty bookings. You buy a ticket at the window.

Daily, 11am to midnight, with showtimes set by the week's program

The brick and half-timber plaza at the entrance to Forest Hills Gardens, laid out by Grosvenor Atterbury and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. between 1912 and 1916, with the railroad station arcade of 1913 on one side. You walk under the arches to get to the Stadium and the paving carries Union Jack patterns in the brickwork. The buildings are still in use as apartments and shops. It is a public plaza with nothing to pay.

Open at all hours as a public plaza

The town library on Bluegrass Lane, and the place that keeps the record of Levittown itself. Its Levittown History Collection holds maps of the tract and the country around it, photographs from the building years, and recorded interviews with people who moved into the first houses. Anyone can walk in and read; the collection does not circulate and staff bring the material out to you.

Mon to Fri, 9am to 9pm. Sat, 9am to 5pm. Closed Sunday from May to October; Sun 1pm to 4pm from late October to early May

A 118-seat cinema in the cellar at 2 Sixth Avenue, which is the same address as The Django and reached by the same stairs. It runs 35mm prints of things nobody else is showing, with a September 2026 week that included Out of the Blue, Showgirls and A Scanner Darkly. Tickets run twelve to nineteen dollars.

No fixed opening hours. The box office runs to the screening schedule, which is posted week by week and generally starts mid-afternoon and runs into the evening

The front piano bar has no cover and the singing waitstaff work for tips. Broadway performers drop in after their own curtain and take a turn.

Daily, 5pm to 2am. Piano bar from about 9pm

The big museum at the top of Eastern Parkway, with the Egyptian holdings, the American period interiors and Judy Chicago's Dinner Party installed permanently on the fourth floor. General admission is a suggested contribution rather than a fixed price, so you can pay what you can and walk in. On the first Saturday of each month it stays open from five until eleven with free admission and live programming.

Wed to Sun, 11am to 6pm. Closed Mon and Tue. First Saturday of the month, also 5pm to 11pm

The gilded limestone building at the corner of Grand Army Plaza, with the bronze figures across the front and a reading floor that anyone can sit on without a card. There is an exhibition space off the lobby and a café inside. It is open until nine Monday through Thursday, which is unusual for a library and useful for an evening door.

Mon to Thu, 9am to 9pm. Fri and Sat, 9am to 6pm. Sun, 1pm to 5pm

A 1920s bank building on Mamaroneck Avenue that the county arts council turned into a gallery, keeping the marble and the vaulted ceiling. Exhibitions change a few times a year and lean toward regional artists rather than blue-chip names. Admission is free and nobody expects you to stay an hour.

Tue to Fri, 12pm to 5pm. Sat, 12pm to 6pm. Closed Sun and Mon

A big open library on Martine Avenue with a café inside it, a gallery that hangs local work and a trove of Westchester local history on the upper floor. There are tables you can sit at for an hour without buying anything and a program calendar that runs author talks and film screenings. The children's library is genuinely one of the better ones in the county.

Mon to Thu, 10am to 9pm. Fri and Sat, 10am to 6pm. Sun, 1pm to 5pm

A single floor of self-taught American art on Columbus Avenue, free every day it opens. The collection runs to quilts and weathervanes. Portraits by painters who never trained hang near the drawings of Henry Darger. You can walk the whole thing in forty minutes.

Wed to Sun, 11:30am to 6pm. Closed Monday and Tuesday

Four floors of contemporary craft in the Edward Durell Stone building on the south side of Columbus Circle, reclad by Brad Cloepfil and reopened in 2008. The collection is glass, clay, metal and fiber rather than painting, and artists work in open studios on the sixth floor. Wednesday is the long day, open until eight.

Tue, Thu to Sun, 10am to 6pm. Wed, noon to 8pm. Closed Monday. Pay-what-you-wish 5pm to 8pm on the first Wednesday of the month, in person only

The oldest Dutch colonial stone house in New York City, part of it built in 1709, standing on Flushing Avenue with a yard around it. The Greater Ridgewood Historical Society runs it as a museum and opens it on weekends. The stone marking the old Brooklyn and Queens boundary line sits on the property.

Saturday and Sunday noon to 5pm. Closed Monday to Friday

The building was the New York City Building at both World's Fairs and housed the United Nations General Assembly in between, and it still holds the Panorama of the City of New York, a 9,335 square foot model of all five boroughs with every structure built before 1992 on it. That is 895,000 buildings at a scale where a house is the size of a grain of rice. Admission is pay what you wish.

Wed to Fri, noon to 5pm. Sat and Sun, 11am to 5pm. Closed Mon and Tue

William Dyckman built this around 1784 on a family farm of more than 250 acres, after the Revolutionary War destroyed what his grandfather had put there in the 1660s. It is the only Dutch colonial farmhouse left in Manhattan, raised above Broadway behind a small garden. General admission is three dollars and the garden is always free.

Thu to Sat, 11am to 4pm. Sun, 11am to 3pm. December to March, Fri and Sat 11am to 4pm with other times by appointment

Rutgers' art museum sits on the corner of George and Hamilton with free admission and no ticket to buy. The collection it is known for is Soviet nonconformist art, the Dodge holdings, which is one of the largest such collections anywhere and not a thing you expect to find in central New Jersey. There is also nineteenth-century French work and a rotating run of shows upstairs.

Wed and Fri, 11am to 6pm. Thu, 11am to 8pm. Sat and Sun, noon to 5pm. Closed Mon and Tue, and closed in August

The only nineteenth century house in Manhattan with its original interior and exterior intact, built in 1832 and lived in by the Tredwell family for close to a century. It became a museum in 1936 with the furniture still in place. It stands on the same block as La MaMa.

Wed to Sun, noon to 5pm. Closed Monday and Tuesday

The contemporary art museum on the Bowery reopened in March 2026 with a seven-story glass addition by OMA next to the original SANAA building, which more than doubled its size. Admission is pay what you wish from seven to nine on Thursday evenings. It is a few minutes from The Box and from Bowery Ballroom.

Tue, Wed, Fri to Sun, 11am to 6pm. Thu, 11am to 9pm. Closed Monday

A former tobacco warehouse on upper Newark Avenue holding artist studios, exhibition floors and art storage in one building. The way in is a free guided tour at 11am or 3pm on a weekday, which takes you through working studios rather than a hung show. It is a long building and the tour covers a lot of it.

Mon to Fri, 9am to 5pm, with free guided tours at 11am and 3pm. Closed Sat and Sun

More than seventy sculptures spread across Pratt's 25-acre campus in Clinton Hill, free and open to anyone who walks in. The work rotates, with pieces on loan from artists and galleries alongside student work. You get in from the corner of DeKalb and Hall or from Willoughby.

Daily, 7am to 7pm, though campus access can vary