Your weekend plans begin here, with a couple of dozen FREE and cheap things to do this first weekend of November, including the annual NYC Marathon, FREE museum admission and Day of the Dead celebrations.
We’re exhausted already, and the weekend hasn’t even started yet!
There’s so much to see and do in NYC and never enough time to see and do it all.
All events are FREE and family-friendly, unless otherwise noted.
The NYC on the Cheap motto is get more NYC for less money.
Let’s hope the weather cooperates with outdoor events, but if it doesn’t, here are some rainy day activities in NYC, besides re-arranging your sock drawer.
Reminder
Daylight Saving Time ends in 2019 on Sunday, Nov. 3, marking the day clocks ‘fall back‘ one hour. Clocks turn back an hour at 2 a.m. on Sunday, Nov. 3, or before you go to sleep on Saturday night.
If you don’t, you will be one hour early for any appointments or events on Sunday morning.
Know Before You Go
There are lots of street fairs and parades this holiday weekend, and street closures for the Marathon.
Be sure to check the street closures advisory so you are not stuck in traffic.
Official NYC Bridge and Street Closures weekly advisory
Official NYC 2019 parking calendar
Best Museum Exhibits for Kids
Butterfly Conservatory: Tropical Butterflies Alive in Winter
This popular display is back at the American Museum of Natural History for its 22nd season with more than 500 butterflies fluttering among colorful tropical flowers and lush green vegetation.
The butterflies are from farms in Florida, Costa Rica, Kenya, Thailand, Malaysia, Ecuador, and Australia.
Beyond being just beautiful, butterflies are important harbingers of environmental change, and the exhibit includes an educational component about the roles butterflies play in ecosystems and the importance of protecting them.
- At AMNH through May 2020
- FREE with museum admission
Art of the Brick
Experience the world’s largest display of LEGO® art.
Artist Nathan Sawaya created more than 100 pieces for this exhibition using only LEGO bricks. The collection features original pieces, as well as re-imagined versions of some of the world’s most famous art masterpieces, including the famous painting known as Scream.
More than one million LEGO bricks were used to create Sawaya’s sculptures.
In addition to the LEGO artworks on display, there are activity stations where kids of all ages can create and design their own.
- Art & Architecture – Recreate famous building, bridges and structures using LEGO bricks.
- Hidden Hands – Build a mystery object inside a covered box using only your sense of touch.
- Assistive Devices – Design a tool that will allow you to pick up an object on a post through a series of various sized windows.
- Describe It – Build a simple object out of view and describes the object to your friend. Then, see if your friend can build the same object based only on the description.
- Six Bricks – Find out how many different things you can build using only six LEGO Duplo bricks.
- LEGO Drag Race – Build a LEGO brick car and test it out on ramps of different inclines.
- Tilt Maze – Rearrange straight LEGO “bar” bricks to create a maze for a wooden ball to navigate through on a tilt-table.
- LEGO Music Box – Create your own unique song using a special LEGO baseplate. On the baseplate, horizontal lines represent different “tracks,” and vertical columns represent the eight “beats.” Use different colored LEGO bricks as instruments or notes/pitches to create your song. Then put the visual representation of your song under a camera, where simple image processing algorithms will turn it into music.
Art of the Brick is at the New York Hall of Science in Flushing Meadow Park.
- $7 per person, plus NYSCI admission.
- Take the 7 train to the 111th St. station.
See also
FREE museum admission every weekend
Opening This Weekend
Brooklyn Flea and Smorg heads indoors for the winter this weekend.
NYC on the Cheap is a member of
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