Your Library Card Can Now Get You Into All Of These Museums For Free (2024)

The New York Public Library, Brooklyn Public Library, and Queens Library have announced a new perk that comes with being a card-carrying member: you can now score free passes to over 30 museums with your library card. This includes the big ones, like the Met, MoMA, the Whitney, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and many more. Library cards, what CAN'T they do?

Can you just stroll up and show your library card at the Met? No. You'll have to reserve your passes online first.

The initiative is called Culture Pass, and it will provide 58,000 passes per year (adding up to over $2 million a year). Who exactly is paying for this? The NYPL notes that "while the museums donated the passes, private funding was critical to administer the program." (A NYPL card costs you nothing.)

You can get your free admission via culturepass.nyc. Here's the fine print:

• Patrons can borrow passes that allow entrance for two or four people (the institution chose).
• Patrons can borrow passes for dates between two and three months in advance (while supplies last).
• Patrons can only have two pending reservations at any given time, but can use Culture Pass as often as they’d like throughout the year.
• After reserving a pass, patrons can print it out (at home or using a library printer) or have a mobile pass on your phone, which they’ll show at the institution when they arrive.
• Patrons must show ID to utilize the pass.

Museums not your thing? You can also stream endless hours of television shows and movies with your library card, via their partnership with Kanopy — more on that here. Museums totally your thing? Well then, the program starts TODAY (July 16th), and will run for at least three years. Here are the museums participating:

• Brooklyn Botanic Garden
  
• Brooklyn Children's Museum
  
• Brooklyn Historical Society
  
• Brooklyn Museum
  
• Children's Museum of Manhattan
  
• Children's Museum of the Arts
  
• Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
  
• The Drawing Center
  
• The Frick Collection
  
• Historic Richmond Town
  
• International Center of Photography
  
• Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum
  
• Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art
  
• The Jewish Museum
  
• Louis Armstrong House
  
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art
  
• The Morgan Library & Museum
  
• Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1
  
• Museum of Chinese in America
  
• Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust
  
• Museum of the City of New York
  
• New York Transit Museum
  
• Noguchi Museum
  
• Queens Historical Society
  
• Queens Museum
  
• Rubin Museum of Art
  
• SculptureCenter
  
• Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian
  
• Society of Illustrators
  
• Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
  
• Sugar Hill Children's Museum
  
• Wave Hill
  
• Whitney Museum of American Art

“New York City is home to some of the world’s most remarkable museums,” NYPL President and CEO Anthony W. Marx said in a statement. “We work every day to ensure that all New Yorkers can take advantage of all these unique destinations in order to learn, grow, and benefit from the city’s great wealth of information and enriching experiences. Culture Pass is an exciting way to expand that work and help all New Yorkers explore and discover the city’s treasures.”

All those cultural institutions just a subway ride away, for free? Almost makes the sink rat babies worth it.

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