free things to do in New York City
Free events for Sunday, 05/21/23
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Free Events, Free Things to Do in New York City!  Read More

Are you looking for free things to do in New York City (NYC) on May 21, 2023?

22 free events take place on Sunday, May 21 in New York City. Don't miss the opportunities that only New York provides! Exciting, high quality, unique and off the beaten path free events and free things to do take place in New York today, tonight, tomorrow and each day of the year, any time of the day: whether it's a weekday or a weekend, day or night, morning or evening or afternoon, December or July, April or November! These events will take your breath away!

New York City (NYC) never ceases to amaze you with quantity and quality of its free culture and free entertainment. Check out May 21 and see for yourself. Summer or Winter, Spring or Fall! Just click on any day of the calendar above and you'll find most inspiring and entertaining free events to go to and free things to do on each day of May . Don't miss the opportunities that only New York provides!

Some events take place all year long: same day of the week, same time there are there for you to take advantage of. One of the oldest free weekly events in Manhattan is Dixieland Jazz with the Gotham Jazzmen, which happen at noon every Tuesday. Another example of an event that you can attend all year round on weekdays is Federal Reserve Bank Tour, which takes place every week day at 1 pm (but advanced reservations are required). You can take at least 13 free tours every day of the year, except the New Year Day, July 4th, and the Christmas Day. If you are classical music afficionado, you can spend whole day in New York going from one free classical concert to another. If you love theater, then New York gives you an option to attend plays and musicals free of charge, or at deep discount. You just need to have information about it. And we are here to make that information available to you.
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The quality and quantity of
free events,
free things to do
that happen in New York City
every day of the year
is truly amazing.

So don't miss the opportunities
that only New York provides:
stop wondering what to do;
start taking advantage of
free events to go to,
free things to do in NYC
today!

22 free things to do in New York City (NYC) on Sunday, May 21, 2023

All events are free unless otherwise noted.

Editor's Picks

free events nyc Mishpachah Festival: A Celebration of Genealogy, Heritage and Immigration
free events nyc Historic Chinatown Parks and Monuments Tour
free events nyc An Afternoon of Short New Plays
free events nyc Celebrate Duke Ellington's Birthday and National Tap Dance Day
free events nyc LIVESTREAM: New York Philharmonic Performs Mahler with Grammy Winning Conductor
More Editor's Picks for 05/21/23
        

Workshop | Tai Chi Sunday


Silvana Pizzuti leads tai chi, a slow moving martial art with health benefits for all fitness levels.
   New York City, NY; NYC
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8:00 am
Free

Tour | 13 Tours, All City Neighborhoods, Any Time Of The Day, Choose One Tour Or Many


These free tours take place at various times during the day, all day long. You can make reservations for as many tours as your schedule allows. SoHo, Little Italy and Chinatown Brooklyn Bridge, Brooklyn Heights + DUMBO 3 Hour Lower Manhattan Harlem Chelsea and the High Line 6 Hour Downtown Combined Greenwich Village Central Park Lower Manhattan Midtown Manhattan Grand Central Terminal Graffiti and Street Art Tours World Trade Center
   New York City, NY; NYC
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10:00 am
Free

Festival | Mishpachah Festival: A Celebration of Genealogy, Heritage and Immigration


The Hebrew word Mishpachah means family. The day-long Mishpachah Festival will celebrate and explore Jewish genealogy, heritage, and immigration with JewishGen, the Museum's genealogy arm, and other partners. Overlooking the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, the stories of Jewish families and experiences around the world through time will converge in New York City. The festival will feature music, activities for kids and families, Jewish genealogy lectures, cooking demonstrations, Jewish heritage panels, and more.
   New York City, NY; NYC
10:00 am
Free

Symposium | Moving Chains: Toward Abolition


A day-long public program bringing together an interdisciplinary group of artists, scholars, and educators working on strategies for abolition in art, law, education, and political action. The day's workshops, talks, presentations, and walking tour center on the possibilities and limitations of achieving abolition through the law. The contested, moving, and blurred lines between people and property persists today as one of the foundations of racial capitalism, the economic and structural afterlife of chattel slavery. As scholar, and panelist, Saidiya Hartman argues, while discussing the specters of freedom, the political and legal structure of liberty is a permutation of slavery--freedom can never be possessed, only shared. Moving Chains: Toward Abolition offers an opportunity to consider how freedom can be defined outside of the contours of property, considers past examples of movements using the law in the fight for freedom, and ultimately asks whether abolition and the law are compatible or not.
   New York City, NY; NYC
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10:00 am
Free

Fair | Street Fair


Free fun for the whole family, including arts, crafts, antiques, plants, entertainment, games, and more.
   New York City, NY; NYC
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10:00 am
Free

Tour | Tour the Tall Ship Capitán Miranda


The 1930 Capitán Miranda, a sail training tall ship of the Uruguayan Navy, arrives in New York. Throughout her visit she will be docked and will offer several opportunities for the public to come aboard and tour the historic three-masted full-rigged vessel and learn more about the relationship between the US and Uruguay.
   New York City, NY; NYC
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10:00 am
Free

Tour | Historic Flatiron-Nomad District Walking Tour


Join a professional guide on a 90-minute journey through this vibrant neighborhood, viewing some of the City's most notable landmarks, including the New York Life Insurance Building, the MetLife Clock Tower, the Appellate Courthouse, and the famous Flatiron Building. Rain or shine. Every Sunday at 11 am.
   New York City, NY; NYC
11:00 am
Free

Workshop | Sunday Morning Tai Chi


Taught by Richard Anton Diaz, these classes are suitable for all levels from beginner to advanced.
   New York City, NY; NYC
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11:00 am
$5

Workshop | Tree Wonder: Draw Manhattan's Oldest Tree


A gathering to wonder and draw the English Elm, the oldest tree in Manhattan. Sundays, April 30-June 25, 2023
   New York City, NY; NYC
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11:00 am
Free

Festival | 8th Annual Greek Jewish Festival


The Greek Jewish Festival celebrates and showcases the unique Romaniote and Sephardic heritage of the Jews of Greece. The festival will offer a feast for the senses including authentic kosher Greek foods and homemade Greek pastries, live Greek and Sephardic musical performances with four different bands and two different traditional dance performances, an outdoor marketplace full of vendors, arts and educational activities for kids, Sephardic cooking demonstrations, and much more. This is the only festival of its kind in the world.
   New York City, NY; NYC
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12:00 pm
Free

Play | An Afternoon of Short New Plays


Featuring works by Sarah Congress, Michael Chepiga, Laurel Lockhart, Parker Cross, Denis Meadows, Jen Ju, Julia Genoveva, and more. Bring a folding chair, as seating may be limited.
   New York City, NY; NYC
1:00 pm
Free

Park Walk | Historic Chinatown Parks and Monuments Tour


Urban Park Rangers will guide you through Chinatown parks, highlighting significant events and commemorations.
   New York City, NY; NYC
1:00 pm
Free

Gallery Talk | Museum Closer Look Tour


A public tour of current exhibitions, led by museum Gallery Guides.
   New York City, NY; NYC
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1:00 pm
Free

Concert | Celebrate Duke Ellington's Birthday and National Tap Dance Day


An outdoor event with performances by the Duke Ellington Center Big Band, musicians, dancers, and vocalists. This year's lineup includes the Harlem Samba, a Brazilian percussion ensemble whose members are students, alumni and friends of the Frederick Douglass Academy, a public high school in Harlem. Vocalists Marion Cowings, Sharon K. Janda, Antoinette Montague and Ty Stephens will perform, as well as ballroom dancer Michael Choi, tap dancers A.C. Lincoln and Karen Callaway Williams. Two students from ATDF's American Tap Dance Center, Shareef Coll and Kyleigh Vickers, will complete the program. Mark Mindek will appear on stilts.
   New York City, NY; NYC
2:00 pm
Free

Classical Music | LIVESTREAM: New York Philharmonic Performs Mahler with Grammy Winning Conductor


This live-streamed performance is presented on the 50-foot Digital Wall at an in-door public place. New York Philharmonic; and Gustavo Dudamel, conductor, perform Mahler. Program Mahler (1860-1911), Symphony No. 9 About the Performers The New York Philharmonic, one of the leading world orchestras, was founded in 1842 by the American conductor Ureli Corelli Hill, with the aid of the Irish composer William Vincent Wallace. The first concert of the Philharmonic Society took place on December 7, 1842 in the Apollo Rooms on lower Broadway before an audience of 600. It is the oldest major symphony orchestra in the United States in continual existence and one of the oldest in the world. The New York Philharmonic announced that Gustavo Dudamel will become the Orchestra's next Music Director, beginning in the 2026-27 season. As the New York Philharmonic's 27th Music Director, Dudamel -- who has been Music and Artistic Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic since 2009, Music Director of the Opera National de Paris since 2021, and Music Director of the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela since 1999 -- will become part of a legacy that includes Gustav Mahler, Arturo Toscanini, and Leonard Bernstein. One of the few classical musicians to become a bona fide pop culture phenomenon, Dudamel's film credits include Steven Spielberg's new adaptation of Bernstein's West Side Story, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Mozart in the Jungle, Sesame Street, and The Simpsons. He has performed at the Super Bowl halftime show, the Academy Awards, and the Nobel Prize Concert, and has worked with pop stars Coldplay, Billie Eilish, Christina Aguilera, Beyonce, Bruno Mars, and others. Among his many honors, he has received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people. His extensive, multiple Grammy Award-winning discography includes 65 releases. This event is an in-person livestream of the concert.
   New York City, NY; NYC
2:00 pm
Free

Concert | The Last Word of Dutch Schultz: Music Based on Burroughs


Guitarist and composer Pat Irwin is joined by violinist Jonathan Zalben and cellist Josh Wise in a presentation of “music from a fiction in the form of a film script” by William S. Burroughs.
   New York City, NY; NYC
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2:00 pm
Free

Discussion | Astro Live: Crew Capsule Recovery (online)


Hear from members of NASA’s Commercial Crew and Exploration Ground Systems Programs about their operations to successfully retrieve crewed spacecraft after splashdown, as well as upcoming recovery plans for the Artemis II mission following its 10-day journey around the Moon.
   New York City, NY; NYC
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3:00 pm
Free

Classical Music | 20th Century Organ Works at a Beautiful Church


Organist Stephen Fraser. Program Jean Langlais (1907-1991), from Suite médiévale: 5. “Acclamations carolingiennes” Paul Creston (1906-1985), from Suite for Organ: 2. Prayer Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992), from L'ascension: 3. Transports de joie Florence B. Price (1887-1953), Adoration Maurice Duruflé (1902-1986), from Prélude, Adagio et Choral varié sur le thème du “Veni Creator”, Op. 4: 3. Choral varié
   New York City, NY; NYC
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3:15 pm
Free

Classical Music | Serene organ meditations in an intimate venue (In Person AND Online)


Enjoy a program of hymns, anthems, and voluntaries for the organ.
   New York City, NY; NYC
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4:00 pm
Free

Talk | Artist Helen Frankenthaler in the 1950s (online)


Elizabeth Smith, executive director of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, will give a talk in conjunction with the exhibition Creative Exchanges: Artists in Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner’s Address Books, currently on view at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, East Hampton, New York. Smith will consider some of Frankenthaler’s earliest works and will reflect on what made Frankenthaler’s painting, in Morris Louis’s later words, a “bridge between Pollock and what was possible” for other artists in the 1950s.
   New York City, NY; NYC
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5:00 pm
Free

Talk | Responding to Israel’s Political Crisis


Yizhar Hess will speak about the ongoing political crisis in Israel and how American Jews can and should respond. Yizhar Hess is Vice Chairman of the World Zionist Organization. He previously served as CEO of the Masorti (conservative) Movement in Israel and is one of the leading voices in Israel promoting Jewish pluralism. Hess is a member of the Executive of the Jewish Agency, the Board of Trustees of Keren Hayesod and the Board of Governors of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
   New York City, NY; NYC
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6:00 pm
Free

Dance Performance | Sundays on Broadway: Dance and Video


Forming a modern bestiary, Jade Manns's work-in-progress explores the convergence of animal, god, and man through a flurry of gestural fragments. In it we see the cold, angelic spirit of the American modern dancer's disciplined striving for beauty alongside the erratic and disoriented convulsions of man, the neurotic animal. The imagery erratically shifts and rearranges, creating a dense panorama of disparate images in constant counterpoint to one another. The unpredictably fluctuating movement creates a visual representation of the confusion between the natural and the artificial, the divine and the human. Juliette Mapp will perform a short solo called Free Day. She writes, "Dancing is the experience of creating and holding a free space in my mind and around my body within which I can project and move freely. When I dance, I create a space that does not normally exist--but it can be a reinterpretation or reorganization of that which normally does exist. I believe it is through moving within this free space that a semblance of meaning can emerge for me and the audience, like wandering on a free day." Jo McKendry's 15 ways to cross a paddock (working title) is a collaboration with dancer Molly Ross. "We like being in our own and each other's bodies, the way that dance is and allows for this," says McKendry. "It's sacredness in this sense. We're half or double the other's age. Somehow this interests us both. The dance isn't exactly about that, but how is it not?" Cathy Weis has produced a video archive that is a unique record of dance and performance from a dynamic and eclectic period of downtown NYC art-making. Approaching her camerawork with a choreographer's eye, she captured many rare and improvisational performances by emerging and established artists. Weis will be showing footage shot in the theaters and on the streets of NYC between 1985-1987.
   New York City, NY; NYC
6:00 pm
$10 suggested admission...
Complimentary Tickets

to shows, concerts ... (CFT Deals!)

Play | A Play with Tony Nominated Director

Regular Price: $60.55
CFT Member Price: $0.00

Play | Epic Theatrical Adventure!

Regular Price: $69
CFT Member Price: $0.00
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