A guide to maximizing free tickets from the libraries' Culture Pass
The often-slept-on program offers free tickets to museums, botanic gardens, theaters, movies and more
Let this week’s fake spring serve as a warning shot: the actual warm months in the city are just around the corner, which are the best time of year to live in New York, but also often the most brutally expensive. Let’s make sure we’re maximizing our access to free stuff, shall we?
We’ve written before about the still-excellent, little-advertised benefits offered by the IDNYC program, and it’s also come to our attention that not nearly enough people are aware of Culture Pass.
Available to cardholders of the New York City Public Library, Brooklyn Public Library and Queens Public Library, Culture Pass has been around since 2018, when it was launched with an eye to opening up the city’s cultural institutions to New Yorkers of all income brackets.
It offers free access to more than 100 museums, theaters, botanic gardens and other attractions across the five boroughs (you can also sometimes snag tickets to movies at Film Forum or even coveted seats at Shakespeare in the Park).
Virginia K. Smith
The list includes several museums we’ve written up here on The Groove — the Alice Austen House and Historic Richmond Town on Staten Island, the Edgar Allen Poe Cottage in the Bronx, the Noguchi Museum — as well as the New York, Queens and Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, and some of the city’s most in-demand and usually-pricey institutions. Think The Frick Collection (normally $30 for one adult ticket), The Intrepid Museum ($38 for an adult ticket) and MoMA ($30), to name a few.
The options are notably kid-friendly, with some sites like the Museum of the Moving Image offering group passes for families of up to four. (The Transit Museum, the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, Bronx Children’s Museum, Children’s Museum of Manhattan, and the Sugar Hill Children's Museum of Art & Storytelling all participate in the Culture Pass program, as well.)
How to maximize your passes
A limited amount of passes for each month are released at midnight on the first of the month (so May passes will become available on April 1), and for especially in-demand sites like Carnegie Hall and the Wollman Rink, power users (plus the good people of Reddit) recommend logging on ASAP each month to lock down your spots. You can reserve one pass per institution per calendar year, and can have up to four active reservations in the program at a given time.
Even doing a cursory check of mid-month options on my Brooklyn Library Card revealed a host of still-available options for March, including free tickets to a screening of Kontinental 25 at Film Forum, as well as entrance to the Cooper Hewitt, the Met Cloisters, MoMA PS1, the Fraunces Tavern Museum (this has especially been on my list this year), and dozens of others.
J. Barnes
It’s likely not news to anyone reading this that New York City’s libraries have had a rough go of it lately. An eternal political football, they saw funding cut and later restored under the Adams administration, and Mayor Mamdani is now threatening $29 million in cuts as part of his ongoing budget haggling with Gov. Hochul. It’s a pretty widely held belief that if you were to try to launch such a system today, it would never get off the ground at all.
And yet, here the libraries are, day after day, year after year, offering us the world. In the form of free books, of course, but also in a jaw-dropping array of other free services we often tend to forget about, including studio space rental, instrument rental, board game rental, and even free seeds. This Saturday, March 14, also marks the return of the Brooklyn Public Library’s beloved “Night in the Library” event, with keynote speaker Werner Herzog and events until 3 in the morning.
Not all of these options are guaranteed to be around forever — please spare a thought for our fallen soldier Kanopy. So consider this your call to get in on the Culture Pass program while the getting is still good.
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