NYers Free Admission

Reciprocity, recognition, free admission for all New Yorkers!

Access to New York City’s institutions of art, culture, science, nature and history has become out of reach for too many New Yorkers. Admission costs that once seemed manageable now pose a real barrier, excluding residents from the very experiences that define our city’s identity. Policies for discounts or occasional free days can be confusing and inaccessible, but more importantly, they are deceptive.

In the mid-1800s, Andrew Greene, who led the City’s Board of Education, pitched the idea of a “Park Education Campus” for what would become Central Park. He and others envisioned that all New Yorkers would be able to walk through the park with seamless, free entry to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History and several others that would line its perimeter, creating a campus that would act as a supplement to the City’s growing public education system.

Central Park would be a decades-long enterprise and an enormous pull on the public purse. Greene’s education roots helped conjure up a noteworthy bargain: in exchange for rent-free use of public parkland and buildings, the Central Park institutions would provide free admission and popular instruction to all New Yorkers. Today, the rent-free use of public parkland and buildings for the 17 campus institutions exceeds $1.2 billion, and New Yorkers are not admitted free.

Today, that original public–private partnership has been broken and buried beneath half measures. The Free Admission Campaign is dedicated to ensuring that all New Yorkers know about their legal rights to free admission, to insisting that the state codify and enforce existing laws, and to demanding compliance, reciprocity, transparency and accountability from the City and its cultural institutions.