(7/20-7/26) Each week, City Guide's Things to Do in NYC brings you the best in special NYC events, the newest exhibits, sightseeing activities, fun for kids, concerts, and nightlife. This week, Summer Restaurant Week (7/25-8/19) kicks off, the Panorama Festival brings music to Randall's Island, you can laugh it up with Louis C.K., and much more!
THIS WEEK IN NEW YORK: THE BIG EVENT
(7/22-7/24) The inaugural Panorama Festival, a celebration of music, art, and technology, will take place on Randall's Island. Live acts include LCD Soundsystem (pictured), Arcade Fire, Alabama Shakes, Sia, and Kendrick Lamar, rain or shine. Ticket includes voucher for free admission to the Queens Museum. All ages, kids 2 and under free.
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(7/21) 106.7 Lite FM's Broadway in Bryant Park continues, with free midday performances from Fiddler on the Roof, Fuerza Bruta, Cirque du Soleil Paramour, Les Miserables, and more.
(7/25-8/19) Summer Restaurant Week offers a taste of almost 400 of NYC's best dining establishments, rolling out a very affordable red carpet with three-course specials for both lunch and dinner (the meals are mostly on the weekdays, with a few Sundays, and a few brunches, included in the mix). The cost is a fraction of what you might find other weeks—$29 for lunch and $42 for dinner, not including tax, tip, and drinks.
(ongoing) Warp speed ahead! In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the beloved series Star Trek, the Intrepid, Sea, Air & Space Museum welcomes the new exhibition Star Trek: The Starfleet Academy Experience. The museum is the first place in the U.S. to host this brand-new, immersive “Trek Tech” experience, which spans a starship-sized 12,000 square feet. Visitors become cadets, joining the Starfleet Academy’s Career Day in the 26th century. After “student orientation,” cadets visit zones that focus on the Academy’s special training in language, medicine, engineering, navigation, science, and command skills. Check out interactive activities and unique technology, including voice recognition to communicate in Klingon, a medical tricorder table, planet projection mapping, holograms, and a target game using the show’s iconic phasers. You can get your results and a certificate emailed to you. On your way out, take a selfie in the captain’s chair; you can also visit the fully restored Shuttlecraft Galileo, which carried the crew in the original series.
Click here for our Intrepid Coupon to save $3 now (max 4 persons) off admission!
THIS WEEK IN NEW YORK: EXHIBITION OF THE WEEK
(now-7/31) Final weeks! Hey! Ho! Let's Go! Ramones and the Birth of Punk takes a look at the legendary New York-bred band at the Queens Museum.
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(7/23) From “Forest Hills: Birthplace of Punk” to “Rock Rock Rockaway Beach” at the Queens Museum. Take a tour exploring the land of musicians, degenerates and dentists, otherwise known as Forest Hills, Queens. See the birthplace of the Ramones and explore the neighborhood that started it all. Hear first-hand accounts of the group’s upbringing and years on the road from Ramones accomplice and tour manager Monte Melnick. The indomitable Levy’s Unique New York will help guide the way. The tour will culminate in a concert at the Low Tide Bar at the Beach 97th concession in Rockaway Beach with Sick Feeling and Unstoppable Death Machines, and begins with a Hey! Ho! Let’s Go!: Ramones and the Birth of Punk exhibition tour. 2pm-9pm.
(7/26) Explore the universe from Central Park West as the American Museum of Natural History takes a look at the vast reaches of the universe and our place in it via the 3D Digital Universe Atlas with The Grand Tour of the Universe.
(now-1/8/17) Who Shot Sports, A Photographic History, 1843-Present at the Brooklyn Museum gathers together approximately 230 works—from daguerreotypes and salted paper prints to digital images—that capture the universal appeal of sports, highlighting unforgettable moments of drama and excitement from around the globe.
(now-9/25) Atmosphere for Enjoyment: Harry Bertoia's Environment for Sound at the Museum of Arts and Design takes a close look at prolific artist and designer Harry Bertoia's sounding sculptures and gongs.
(now-9/5) History is happening in Manhattan this summer at the New-York Historical Society. Following the incredible success of Hamilton on Broadway, the society is launching the Summer of Hamilton, a packed slate of programming devoted to our nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury. On display are treasured artifacts from Hamilton’s life and career, including his writing desk, life-sized bronze statues of Hamilton and Burr at the moment of their infamous duel, and a monumental case clock given to Hamilton by the Bank of New York. Also on display are nine key documents from Hamilton’s life, including a letter to his wife Eliza. To give a better idea of how this history is now being interpreted on stage in Hamilton, video clips from the show are interspersed throughout the exhibition.
(now-9/7) The Guggenheim’s newest exhibition is the first comprehensive retrospective in nearly 50 years of the work of pioneering artist and educator László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946). Moholy-Nagy: Future Present examines the full career of the utopian modernist who believed in the power of art and technology as a vehicle for social transformation and the betterment of humanity. The presentation brings together more than 300 works, some of which have never before been shown publicly in this country.
(now-9/18) Rembrandt's First Masterpiece is on view at the Morgan Library & Museum. Completed when he was just 23 years old, Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver has long been recognized as Rembrandt's first mature work, which has never before been shown in the U.S. The exhibition includes the original painting, preparation drawings, and early self-portraits.
(now-1/17) The American Museum of Natural History welcomes an exhibit with bite: Crocs: Ancient Predators in a Modern World provides a fascinating look at the world of archosaurs, a group that includes alligators and crocodiles as well as extinct dinosaurs and modern birds.
(now-7/24) Final days! Life is But a Dream, a whimsical two-story house transformed into a childlike dream, opens along with a summer full of art and exploration on Governors Island.
(now-8/16) Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology is open at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Costume Institute's spring 2016 exhibition explores how fashion designers are reconciling the handmade and the machine-made in the creation of haute couture and avant-garde ready-to-wear.
(now-9/11) Impresssionism: American Gardens on Canvas has opened at the New York Botanical Garden. In the Conservatory, stroll through an American Impressionist garden, a stunning interpretation by Francisca Coelho, NYBG's renowned curator and designer, of the alluring gardens that influenced iconic artists such as Childe Hassam and John Singer Sargent. In the Art Gallery, view a beautiful complementary display of more than 20 paintings and sculptures.
(now-7/24) Final days! Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty dazzles at MoMA, with over 100 rarely seen monotypes, joined by related paintings, drawings, pastels, sketchbooks, and prints, showing Degas at his most modern.
(now-9/18) Through nearly 140 works, Roberto Burle Marx: Brazilian Modernist at the Jewish Museum explores the prolific Brazilian landscape architect's output—including paintings, sculptures, theater designs, textiles, and jewelry—as well as related works by contemporary artists and examples from Burle Marx's varied collections.
(now-8/14) Stitching History from the Holocaust unveils dress patterns created by Hedy Strnad, a victim of the Holocaust, found 60 years after her family’s escape from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Their story is brought to life through the contemporary creation of Hedy’s designs and the piecing together of Hedy’s history with her husband, Paul Strnad. Museum of Jewish Heritage.
(now-8/7) Final weeks! Isaac Mizrahi: An Unruly History, the first-ever retrospective on the iconic fashion designer, opens at the Jewish Museum.
(now-1/17) The exciting new exhibit Dinosaurs Among Us, at the American Museum of Natural History, examines how one group of dinosaurs evolved into the birds of today.
(now-9/25) Mo Willems’ beloved children’s book characters are distinctly New York, from Trixie’s very first Brooklyn “Aggle Flaggle Klabble!” to the Mike Nichols and Elaine May inspirations of Elephant and Piggie to the public transportation-obsessed Pigeon. The new exhibition The Art and Whimsy of Mo Willems at the New-York Historical Society brings together original art, sketches, animation cels, and sculptures, all framed by Willems’ life in New York and how it influenced his iconic characters. The show is in an immersive, child-friendly space, featuring an imaginative New York cityscape on the gallery walls, two reading areas, and family audio guides narrated by Willems himself.
(now-10/11) Picturing Prestige: New York Portraits at the Museum of the City of New York shows off the work of some of the leading American painters circa 1700-1860, as they fixed the likenesses of that era's 1% for all time.
(ongoing) Vikings have arrived in Times Square! The term "viking" conjures some basic images, usually that of a fair-haired, statuesque male (think Marvel Comics' Thor, named after the Norse God of Thunder), either in combat or on a ship. It is a noun, a general term defining people from the regions we now know as Sweden, Scandinavia, or Norway, but between 750-1100 AD (well before the regions were named) it was also a verb, meaning “to travel.” Viking treasures have now traveled to New York, where they can be explored in the new Vikings The Exhibition, open at Discovery Times Square.
(permanent) New York’s latest resident is a 122-foot-long dinosaur so new it has yet to be formally named. Going by “Titanosaur” for now, it has taken up residence at the American Museum of Natural History, in a cast of 84 fossil bones uncovered in Patagonia in 2014. The find included a colossal 8-ft. thigh bone, whose shape and size indicated a new species—and one of the biggest dinosaurs ever found. The titanosaur is so large, in fact, that it doesn’t fit in the gallery: a 39-ft.-long neck in a new permanent exhibit extends out towards the elevator banks.
(ongoing) On The Line: Intrepid & The Vietnam War is up at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum. Intrepid made three tours of duty in Vietnam between 1966-1969.
(now-8/16) Beauty—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial, with over 250 recent works by 63 designers that seek to answer the question “Why Beauty Now?,” is up at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.
THIS WEEK IN NEW YORK: COMEDY
(7/22) Comedian Louis C.K. brings his show for one Friday evening at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens.
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(7/20) New Zealand comedy/band duo Flight of the Conchords, from the popular HBO show of the same name, also performs at Forest Hills Stadium.
(7/21) College Night at Stand Up NY, featuring Jared Freid, Ari Shaffir, Sam Morril, Nimesh Patel, Mark Normand, and Kate Wolff.
(7/21) Drew Fraser at Gotham Comedy Club, with Sam Morril, Michelle Buteau, and Jimmy Failla.
(7/22-7/23) Rachel Feinstein, Vic Henley, Vlad Caamano, Emma Willman (8pm show) and Jon Fisch (10pm) at Gotham Comedy Club.
(7/22-7/23) Eddie Izzard at Beacon Theatre.
(7/22) Stand Up NY Showcase, featuring Mike Yard, Hadiyah Robinson, Phil Hanley, Veronica Mosey, and Kurt Metzger.
Get free admission for two to Stand Up NY!
THIS WEEK IN NEW YORK: KIDS
(now-10/9) Arcade Classics: Video Games from the Museum's Collection at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. Check out vintage arcade games including Space Invaders, Asteroids, Tempest, Centipede, Berzerk, and more! Plus now through 8/28 enjoy summer kids matinee screenings of films like Fantastic Mr. Fox, Toy Story, and Zootopia.
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(Ongoing) Explore the beautiful interactive exhibit Connected Worlds at the New York Hall of Science in Queens.
THIS WEEK IN NEW YORK: SIGHTSEEING
(new) The new Ghostbusters film in now in theatres! Catch the brand new Ghostbusters Experience (walk through/immersive) and Ghostbusters Dimension, a Virtual Reality Experience at Madame Tussauds. Get ready to strap on some gear and laser some ghosts against breathtaking, realistic backdrops. The technology puts you right there!
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(7/24) Pop Up Fare at World Financial Center features gourmet food, handmade crafts, and entertainment for the whole family.
Take a thrilling white-knuckle 30-minute cruise of the Manhattan skyline aboard THE SHARK Speedboat thrill ride with Circle Line Downtown. Take $5 off your ride now.
(ongoing) Take a one-hour tour of one of the world's most important buildings, the United Nations, now celebrating 70 years. (Tours offered weekdays only.)
(ongoing) One of NYC's most iconic sports and music venues, Madison Square Garden, offers a must-see MSG All Access Tour. Take $4 off admission now.
Take a selfie with new arrival James Bond, Taylor Swift, One Direction, Ed Sheeran, and countless other famous celebs at Madame Tussauds New York!
Explore NYC with a magical live interactive experience when you take THE RIDE and The TOUR! Find out about special summer only discounts for early risers!
Check out the new "tour about nothing" When Harry Met Seinfeld with On Location Tours.
The One World Observatory is open. Start by ascending to the top of the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere in less than sixty seconds, in state-of-the-art "Sky Pod Elevators" that feature a floor-to-ceiling LED screen showing the ever-evolving New York skyline. Once reaching the 100th floor, visitors can take in panoramic, uninterrupted views on the main platform. Click here for information about ordering tickets and getting a free collectible pin!
Explore NYC's Financial District with Wall Street Walks.
THIS WEEK IN NEW YORK: NIGHTLIFE & MUSIC
(7/20) Guitar legends Jeff Beck & Buddy Guy perform together at The Theater at Madison Square Garden.
(7/21) Zephyr Pride Cruise.
(7/21-7/23) As You Like It at Bryant Park: Shakespeare's classic with a steampunk twist.
(7/21) Americana roots band Chamomile and Whiskey at Rockwood Music Hall.
(7/22) Rose Summer Friday at Beautique.
(7/22-8/27) Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center.
(7/23) Star of Broadway's Les Miz's Ramin Karimloo performs at B.B. King Blues Club & Grill.
(7/22, 7/29) Check out the American Museum of Natural History's summertime Evening Bat Walks in Central Park, which make use of a detector that reveals the bats’ otherwise inaudible high-frequency chirps (registration required).
(7/26) From sadness to euphoria, from Springsteen's "Two Faces Have I" to Annie Lennox's "Why," singer Ellen Kaye makes the classics contemporary while indulging her Tom Waits addiction. Catch her performing live at Iridium Jazz Club with featured guest artist UK guitarist Paul Rose and Ethan Fein and the LiveIt!LIVE Band.
Click here for summer outdoor concerts.
SNEAK PEEK, NEXT WEEK
(7/26-7/27) British alt-rock band Radiohead takes over two evenings at Madison Square Garden.
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(7/27, 7/29) British rocker Bryan Ferry performs at the Beacon Theatre.
(7/28) Heart, Joan Jett, & Cheap Trick share the bill at Jones Beach, just a short trip away from the city by the Long Island Railroad (LIRR).