If Super Bowl Sunday is not the most important day of the year to you, here five suggestions how and where you can avoid the Big Game entirely in New York City:
Go to a museum. NYC museums are all open on Super Bowl Sunday. Take your pick. Our picks:
- Celebrate the Lunar New Year at the Met Museum, with a family-friendly festival of origami workshops, dance performances and more.
- The National Museum of Math in Flatiron sounds like a bore, but it’s fascinating, since everything we do is based on math, from the tempo of music and dance to building skyscrapers and figuring out our taxes. Exhibits are designed for fun and let you learn something, too.
- Celebrate Black History Month at the Paley Center for the Media with a full-day of screenings of imortant TV shows and appearances with African-American artists, including Lena Horne on Sesame Street and the first segment of the pioneering series Roots.
Hang out with the city’s real wildlife. The Brooklyn Botanical Garden First Sunday family-day is literally for the birds on Super Bowl Sunday, focusing on the city’s winter wildlife. Kids can build a bird’s nest, everybody can take a guided birding tour.
- Bryant Park Winter Carnival - This is the final weekend of ten days of winter fun, including an ice house. FREE.
See a show. Our recommendation is the Thunderbird American Indian Dancers performing all weekend on the Lower East Side. This is a knock-out group of Native Americans from a variety of tribes living in the New York City area who perform traditional dances combined with storytelling. Tickets are just $10.
Visit the future. The new FordHub “City of Tomorrow” exhibit just opened in the Oculus transportation center downtown, with virtual reality tours of the city, exhibits on what we’ll be driving one day, and games that teach about the environment, even how regenerative braking works in electric and hybrid cars. And it’s FREE.
Stay home and binge watch Oscar-winning films. Each year, TCM (Turner Classic Movies) programs 31 Days of Oscar, with Oscar-winning films all day every day through the Academy Awards are handed out again at the end of February. This year, they are in alphabetical order. Sunday’s films include Bullitt, with Steve McQueen and what’s generally regarded as the best car chase ever filmed, and Casablanca, generally regarded as one of the best films ever made, and timely today again since it’s about an anti-war activist and the people who help him escape. And a love story, of course. Play it again, Sam.