39 free things to do in New York City (NYC) on Monday, October 23, 2017
All events are free unless otherwise noted.
This is a 3-hour tour that begins with a walk over the Brooklyn Bridge, an icon of New York City for ...
more >> over 125 years, with spectacular views of Manhattan and Brooklyn. The tour then moves on to a stroll of Brooklyn Heights, America’s and New York City’s first suburb. The tour then explores the neighborhood DUMBO before ending at the Fulton Ferry landing.
The 3-hour walking and subway tour covers the Financial District including Wall Street and the World ...
more >> Trade Center, SoHo, Little Italy and Chinatown. These are neighborhoods that simply can’t be fully appreciated from a bus. There will be one or two opportunities to sample tasty treats.
It is here, as much as anywhere, where American history started. It's where the first US Congress assembled ...
more >> and produced the Bill of Rights and where President George Washington took his first oath of office. It's here where the world's most important stock exchange and one of the most famous bridges stand. And it is here where an unspeakable tragedy took place and where a rebirth is underway.
You've seen the iconic skyscrapers, attended a Broadway show, visited Lady Liberty and relaxed in Central ...
more >> Park. Looking for a little more of the Big Apple? Maybe it's time to visit some of Manhattan's oldest and most enchanting historic districts. Take a relaxing stroll through SoHo, Little Italy and Chinatown.
Stars: Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Sigourney Weaver. Three former parapsychology professors set up shop ...
more >> as a unique ghost removal service. 105 min.
11:00 am
free, no reservation required
Exercise your mind with the New York Times crossword puzzle. Start with the easiest of the week (Monday) ...
more >> or try your luck with the most difficult (Sunday). Collaborate with fellow participants or work on your own.
12:00 pm
free, no reservation required
Editor's Pick
Join this tour to learn more about the history, architecture, and sculpture of Columbia and the Morningside ...
more >> Heights campus. Whether you're an amateur New York City historian or visiting campus for the first time, you will leave the tour knowing more about our storied past. Given that the tour route is outdoors, please be aware that tours are occasionally suspended due to inclement weather.
1:00 pm
free, no reservation required
Stars: Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr. A defrocked Episcopal clergyman leads a bus-load of ...
more >> middle-aged Baptist women on a tour of the Mexican coast and comes to terms with the failure haunting his life. 125 min.
1:00 pm
free, no reservation required
Take a mid-day pause to refresh your mind and re-establish your center in the midst of bustling city ...
more >> life. Meditation is a powerful tool to eliminate stress, to heal the body, mind, and brain, and to enhance your personal well-being and positive relationship with the world.
1:00 pm
$10 suggested donation
Greenwich Village is among Manhattan's most desirable and expensive residential neighborhoods. It's history, ...
more >> however, betrays it's monied status. The Village, with it's quiet, shaded streets, lined with lovely brick and brownstone townhouses, was once the incubating ground of artistic, social and political movements that have helped shape US history. From the Beats to the Folk Movement, from workers rights to gay rights, the Village has often been the center of it all.
Although world famous, Harlem may be New York's best kept secret with some of the city's best architecture, ...
more >> food, music and people. Harlem's history is also one of the city's most dramatic, having gone through many ethnic, cultural and socioeconomic changes over the past roughly 400 years, which have resulted in a diverse array of places of worship, theaters, homes and eating establishments.
Stars: Joan Crawford, Diane Baker, Leif Erickson. After a twenty-year stay at an asylum for a double ...
more >> murder, a mother returns to her estranged daughter while suspicions arise about her behavior. 93 min.
2:00 pm
free, no reservation required
After his death, writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) became a global icon of modern literature and a pop ...
more >> culture brand. Best known for his Gothic horror tales and narrative poem “The Raven,” Poe’s stories are the basis of countless films and TV episodes, and have inspired even more, as has his name and image. At least four American cities claim this literary legend as their own – Baltimore, Richmond, Philadelphia and New York: an NFL football team is named after one of his poems, and his image appears on everything from the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover to lunchboxes, bobbleheads and socks. Creating the detective fiction genre with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), Poe wrote over 100 short stories and poems altogether, beginning with Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), his first published work. Written and directed by Eric Stange (The War That Made America, American Experience: Murder at Harvard), the new documentary American Masters – Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive draws on the rich palette of Poe’s evocative imagery and sharply drawn plots to tell the real story of the notorious author.
3:15 pm
free, no reservation required
Speaker Dan Baer is a Diplomat in Residence at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International ...
more >> Affairs. He was U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe from 2013 to 2017. He previously served as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor from 2009-2013. Baer was an assistant professor at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business, a Faculty Fellow at Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics, and a project leader at The Boston Consulting Group.
4:00 pm
free, no reservation required
Learn the basics of working with spreadsheets using Microsoft Excel 2010. Topics include entering data ...
more >> and formulas, moving and copying data, formatting and print previewing worksheets.
4:00 pm
free, no reservation required
Editor's Pick
Perhaps no single event in recent memory has had such an effect on – and continues to have the potential ...
more >> to affect – US-Russian relations then the ongoing allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 United States Presidential Elections. From secret meetings at Trump Tower to Facebook ads and bots to FBI wiretaps and raids, this story seems to take new twists and turns almost weekly. Timothy Frye is the Marshall D. Shulman Professor of Post-Soviet Foreign Policy and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Columbia University. Seva Gunitsky is an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto. Julia Ioffe is a staff writer at The Atlantic, covering politics and international affairs. She was a Moscow-based correspondent for Foreign Policy and The New Yorker from 2009-2012. Joshua A. Tucker is Professor of Politics, an affiliated Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies, and an affiliated Professor of Data Science.
4:00 pm
free, no reservation required
Explore more advanced features of Microsoft Excel 2010. Topics include using formulas and functions, ...
more >> data sorting and conditional formatting.
4:30 pm
free, no reservation required
Too often consumers find themselves paying much more money than they expected, getting much less than ...
more >> they bargained for. Medical care is no exception.
5:30 pm
free, no reservation required
Join Jim Rose, long time meditator for this deep and engaging meditation workshop. Adults 18+.
New York City, NY; NYC
A culminating performance of the "Across a Crowded Room" Musical Theater writing workshop. After participating ...
more >> in a summer of master classes presented by the Library, teams of emerging theater makers will present live performances of their newly written, twenty-minute musicals, followed by feedback from established theatre professionals.
6:00 pm
free, no reservation required
In the 1970s, an ancient Chinese therapy became a modern medical phenomenon. What explains the sudden ...
more >> popularity of acupuncture in the American medical market? How do the Cold War, counter-culturalism, and immigrant lives shape this moment in medical history? And what lessons can it offer for our own time? Speaker Tamara Venit-Shelton is an associate professor of history at Claremont McKenna College.
Stars: Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, Joshua Leonard. Three film students vanish after traveling ...
more >> into a Maryland forest to film a documentary on the local Blair Witch legend, leaving only their footage behind. 81 min.
6:00 pm
free, no reservation required
The area around the High Line Park was a vital business district of New York City, supplying fresh fruits, ...
more >> French Cheeses and Russian caviar as well as fresh meats to City markets. The hustle and bustle of the streets induced the City to elevate the railroad trains delivering goods to the commercial buildings. When interstate truck traffic made the railway outdated, it fell into ruin, only to be regenerated as a park.
In the course of his career, painter Po Kim worked in three distinct modes, gestural abstraction, realist ...
more >> still-life and symbolist figuration. This talk will examine each of these periods and look at how Po Kim's work related to the art of the period, especially that of other artists working in New York. I will also seek to understand the motives that sparked his stylistic restlessness, and ask whether his early experiences of war and violence in Korea and Japan may have helped inspire his evident faith in the power of art.
Speakers: Prof. Rachel Godsil, Professor at Rutgers University School of Law, Director of Research, Perception ...
more >> Institute Prof. Linda Tropp, Professor of Social Psychology, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
6:00 pm
free, no reservation required
A public talk with Shehla Rashid, who represents one of the most important voices in the anti-fascist ...
more >> struggles in India. She was the Vice President of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Student Union and a member of the All India Student Association. During a tenuous political climate in India, her experience and writings on the subject have made her a major contributor to the conversation of what active, student participation in politics looks like.
In 1995, President Clinton declassified 800,000 photographs from CORONA, the United States' first spy ...
more >> satellite program, in order to make them available for environmental and historical research. Since then, imagery from the U2 aerial missions and from HEXAGON, the CORONA successor, have been declassified as well. Archaeologists working in the Near East have been quick to embrace these newly available resource, which capture images of sites and landscapes in the 1960's. Many of these landscapes have been damaged or destroyed in the intervening 40 years. This presentation will discuss how CORONA imagery has been used to study ancient landscapes in the Near East, with case studies from Bronze Age Syria, Iron Age northern Iraq, and late Antique northwestern Iran. Speaker Jason Ur is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University and director of its Center for Geographic Analysis. Reception to follow.
When five orphan girls are seen innocently playing with boys on a beach, their scandalized conservative ...
more >> guardians confine them while forced marriages are arranged. 97 min.
This presentation examines the linguistic strategies that uphold whiteness as the linchpin of the racial ...
more >> system as well as the counterstrategies that work to undo this system of power. The analysis considers two forms of racializing language: talk about race, or racially referential language, and talk that enacts race, or racially indexical language. Focusing on the uneasy racial positioning of white youth in California both in the 1990s and in the present day, I argue that a political critique of the language of whiteness must be at the center of any effort to challenge white supremacy. Featured Speaker: Mary Bucholtz, Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara.
James Atlas, the celebrated chronicler of Saul Bellow and Delmore Schwartz, takes us back to his own ...
more >> childhood in suburban Chicago, where he fell in love with literature and, early on, found in himself the impulse to study writers’ lives.
6:30 pm
free, no reservation required
Editor's Pick
In light of recent events in Charlottesville, Virginia and other cities across the nation, a panel discussion ...
more >> on Civil War Monuments has been planned -- on the subject of their meaning, the complex histories that surround their realization, and the current socio-political conditions that are causing their very existence to be reconsidered. Should these monuments be saved? Should they be torn down? Is it possible—or even appropriate—to make thoughtful, informed interventions into these works of public art that can preserve their history, diffuse the myth and polarization that surround them and serve as teaching moments for future generations? These and other questions will be posed during the program. Panelists include: · Stony Brook University Professor Michele H. Bogart, whose teaching areas include the social history of public art and urban design and commercial culture in the United States; · Executive Director of the American Historical Association James Grossman whose work has focused on various aspects of American urban history, African American history, the place of history in public culture, and more; · Julian LaVerdiere, a 1993 graduate and co-creator of the Tribute in Light Memorial; · Visual journalist and former CNN correspondent Brian Palmer, who has photographed Virginia's neglected African American cemeteries and more; · Columbia University Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation Mabel O. Wilson, whose design and scholarly research investigates space, politics and cultural memory in black America and race and modern architecture; · Mya Dosch, faculty member who is teaching the fall 2017 course “Take ‘em down: Monuments, Artist Interventions, and the Struggle for Memory in the Americas,” will moderate.
Chicago-born writer and scholar Eve L. Ewing celebrates the launch of her collection of poetry with a ...
more >> conversation with Jamilah Lemieux, followed by a book signing.
7:00 pm
free, no reservation required
For seventeen years, this anthology has served up the cream of each years crop of food writing, from ...
more >> legendary figures like Anthony Bourdain to lauded chefs like Alice Waters, alongside movers-and-shakers like J. Kenji Lopez-Alt and Besha Rodell.
7:00 pm
free, no reservation required
This intercultural literary reading will feature four fiction writers, one from Montreal and three from ...
more >> New York, two of whom (Lesley Trites and Virginia Konchan) will be reading from their debut short story collections. Reading from published stories and those in progress, the theme of the reading is bridging the gap between Canadian and American contemporary fiction — all four readers have either lived in Canada or are Canadian citizens — and integrating the past with the (apocalyptic) future.
7:00 pm
free, no reservation required
Jean Giono (1895–1970) was born and lived most of his life in the town of Manosque, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. ...
more >> Largely self-educated, he started working as a bank clerk at the age of sixteen and reported for military service when World War I broke out. He saw action in several savage battles, including Verdun, and was one of only two members of his company to survive. After the war, he returned to his job and family in Manosque and became a vocal, lifelong pacifist. With the success of his first published novel, Colline, which won the Prix Brentano, he left the bank and began to publish prolifically. During World War II Giono’s outspoken pacifism led some to accuse him, unjustly, of defeatism and of collaboration with the Nazis; after France’s liberation in 1944, he was imprisoned and held without charges. Despite being blacklisted after his release, Giono continued writing and achieved renewed success. Speaker Paul Eprile is a longtime publisher, as well as a poet and translator.
7:00 pm
free, no reservation required
7:30 pm
free, no reservation required
Editor's Pick
For some performers, the show must go on… even after death! The Ghosts on Broadway Tour, led by a veteran ...
more >> New York City talent agent, will introduce you to these notorious theater legends who appear after the lights go dim. You’ll hear about the Broadway impresario who haunts the theater that bears his name. His apparition shows up on opening nights to congratulate the cast or “pinch” the leading ladies’ bottom. Jazz age parties are heard almost nightly from his long abandoned apartment over his theater.
Editor's Pick
Program: Bridge String Quartet No. 1 in E Minor Zhou Long Song of the Chi'in Dvořák String Quartet ...
more >> in E-flat Major, op. 51 Shanghai Quartet: Weigang Li, violin Yi-Wen Jiang, violin Honggang Li, viola Nicholas Tzavaras, cello Few ensembles have the worldwide reputation of the Shanghai Quartet, known for its “utterly sublime” performances (New York Times). They regularly perform in major halls across the world, drawing large crowds of devoted fans. Their performances of repertoire ranging from the complete Beethoven quartets to contemporary Chinese works are marked by “an unwavering unanimity of expressive intent” (Washington Post).
New York is a skyscraper city and there is no better time to view Manhattan’s icons than after the ...
more >> sun sets and the lights go on. Fueled by competition and a dash of audacity, New York City is still producing one of mankind’s most remarkable skyline. NOTE** THIS TOUR SPENDS MUCH TIME INDOORS OR IN SUBWAYS AND GREAT FOR ALL WEATHER CONDITIONS. Please note they do utilize the subway on this tour so you will need $5 for subway.