Even though a walk around any of the famous sites in New York City show that tourist season is already in full swing, we’re offering up anyway some free ideas of things to do in a town where free is normally very hard to come by.

By Matt Stabile

1) Street Fairs

It’s guaranteed that whenever you’re in New York, there’s going to be a free street fair happening somewhere in one of the five boroughs, much to the consternation of the locals whose parking spots are taken over by vendors. There are neighborhood fairs, fairs for Bastille Day, Italian feast fairs — pretty much any excuse to get outside.

Time Out has this comprehensive list updated every week.

2) Live Music At South Street Seaport

New Yorkers avoid the outdoor mall/tourist trap that is South Street Seaport like the plague. But come summer, the pier hosts some of the best indie rock shows of the season, all for free. This year’s shows include performances from Bear in Heaven, Free Energy and YACHT, with others to be announced.

(Tip: Avoid the tourist-priced drinks at the show and buy a 32-ounce, portable Styrofoam cup from Jeremy’s Ale House nearby for a fraction of the price.)

The full list can be found at the River To River Festival’s page.

3) Shakespeare In The Park

Okay, this one’s not exactly a revelation. Shakespeare in the Park has been attracting crowds for over half a century, and a look at the number of people that line up every day is proof it’s as popular as ever. You could line up like everyone else at the theater in the morning, hoping to snag a couple of tickets as they’re given away at 1 p.m.

But, for those in the know, those days of line waiting are a distant memory. Now you can simply get in line virtually, signing up here on the day of the show. If you’re picked, you’ll get an e-mail telling you about your free pair of tickets. Not picked, just try again the next day. (more…)

It seems that North Americans are perpetually torn and divided on which “coast” to favor. Seeing as the United States and Canada are such expansive countries, it’s a luxury to be able to judge those on the other side of the nation.

In Canada, there is a quiet, yet pervasive, rivalry between Vancouver and Toronto (Montreal is always adorable because it’s on the French side). The laid-back, pro-pot-smoking, West-coasters don’t understand the filthy, grimy, stressful life of those living in Ontario’s capitalist capital.

The same goes for the United States. San Franciscans are social progressives who have a cool calm outlook which contrasts with the hub-bub-addicted, hyper-caffeinated New Yorkers. Over the decades, as each city created its cultural stamp, the friendly-feuding began.

I stumbled across this clip on WorldHum. It’s an attempt to vouch for San Fran in 76-seconds put together by Robert Reid, a Brooklyn resident. In it he developed four reasons why Frisco seems better than New York:

1) The Mission burritos are better, wrapped with more foil to contain all deliciousness within.

2) Better coffee culture with better coffee. (Question is, why don’t they drink more of it?)

3) BART is better.

4) San Francisco has been the same for decades: It embraces what it is.

New York has lots to offer, too — an opera-singing Chinese-food delivery man and being listed as 8th most bike-friendly city in America — just to name a couple. In the end, do these things really make one city better than the other or just different? My bet is on the latter.

Personally, I respect the West-side but feel most at home in the East — my Manifest Destiny never really kicked in. There is a sense of reality that is forever present in New York City and Toronto. Perhaps it’s just my fascination with the cynical, skeptical, chain-smoking coffee-drinking jerks.

I still enjoyed my stays in San Francisco and Vancouver, both cities having lots to offer in terms of beauty and tranquility, a different pace of life, a utopia. However, by the end of the week, I was happy to head back, East of Eden.

This morning, as a tour bus nearly took out a part of my foot while I was crossing the street, I realized that tourist season had officially begun here in New York, a season that seems to coincide with both baseball season and me-sweating-profusely-due-to-lack-of-air-conditioning-on-the-subway-platform season.

Back in December, when a few other visitors were in town, I posted about free things to do in New York City, including free museums, music, and events. This week, Time Out decided to help me out and devote an entire issue to the cause of free NYC, including an exhaustive guide to getting into the city’s best museums, hearing live music, and even eating free, all for $0.

The best part about the guide? You could visit several museums a day, Tuesday though Sunday, completely gratis. Of course, to do this it would mean spending your Tuesday afternoon at the Staten Island Museum (okay, so you don’t have to go to one every day).

On Thursday try the Museum of Arts & Design Pay from 6–9 p.m., The Museum of Modern Art on Friday from 4–8 p.m., the Guggenheim on Saturday from 5:45–7:45 p.m., and The Frick on Sunday from 11 a.m–1 p.m.

Afterward, head to Vero Wine Bar for a free panini with your overpriced martini, or head to Dell’anima for free frittata triangles, citrus-and-fennel salad and mixed olives with your beverage.

Then, when you’re ready for bed, grab a free copy of the Village Voice and head to the closest park for a couple hours of completely free sleep! Actually, that one’s not in there, in fact the one thing you’re definitely going to have to pay for if you don’t have anyone to shack up with is lodging. That is, if you don’t want to be picked up for vagrancy in the middle of the night in Central Park by the NYPD.

For the full list of all that is free in New York City click through to Time Out here.

Already broke your budget just staying in New York this holiday season? Try these 10 tips to enjoy the city for free.

By Matt Stabile

MUSEUMS

1) MoMA

Normally a steep $20, MoMA (Museum of Modern Art for you acronym-hating readers) is free every Friday from 4:00 - 8:00 p.m. Just head to the front desk and pick up a free ticket for admission then check out Van Gogh’s Starry Night, Monet’s Water Lilies, and Dali’s The Persistence of Memory all for nothing.

TIP: If you plan to check out the Tim Burton exhibit going on right now, head there right at 4 p.m. due to the limited number of entries.

2) The New Museum

With its irregularly stacked white box frame, The New Museum is in fact, literally new (a $64 million renovation was completed in December 2007), and is free on Thursday from 7:00 - 9:00 p.m.

TIP: Grab you iPod and download these free podcasts for the heavily promoted Urs Fischer exhibit. This may help explain all those tongue advertisements you’ve been seeing on the subway.

3) The Metropolitan Museum of Art

They won’t actually tell you this right out in the open, but it’s true: admission here is only recommended. They ask for $20 for adults and $10 for students, but no one’s stopping you from forking over your pocket change. Stingy? Perhaps, but remember, they’re also working with one of the largest endowments for a museum in the world (well over $2 billion dollars). Want to really help? Hit up the gift shop on your way out or at one of the many stores around the city.

TIP: Ever wonder what graffiti looks like through the ages beginning from about 10 B.C.? Head to the reconstructed Temple of Dendur for a good overview. (more…)

Not that it’s entirely unusual to hear a hodgepodge of German, Spanish, French and Dutch when you’re riding the subway in New York City, but the fact that a majority of those that I’ve been hearing are clutching guidebooks, wearing Styrofoam Statue of Liberty crowns, and poring over subway maps only means one thing: it’s August in New York.

Which is why I thought I’d try to help out a bit and list some of my favorite, and more importantly, free things to do in the big city during the month of August.

1) Central Park hosts Shakespeare in the Park, but good luck getting tickets. For free music, dance and film, check out the Central Park SummerStage, with shows in August ranging from dance by The Wheeldon Company, to music by The Pretenders and Dinosaur Jr.

2) With events all over Manhattan, the River to River Festival has historically hosted some of the best free shows in the summer, from indie to classic rock. Though I wouldn’t normally recommend it, a trip to South Street Seaport is a wonderfully odd place to watch music and drink a beer on a warm summer night given the bobbing 19th-century ships floating in the harbor next to the stage.

3) Free outdoor movies are actually easy to come by in the summer. Bryant Park hosts movies every Monday (The Magnificent Seven, Close Encounters of the Third Kind), Brooklyn hosts flicks under the Brooklyn Bridge (Butch Cassidy, Catch Me If You Can, and Edward Scissorhands), and indie flicks and shorts are the main course with the Rooftop Films series.

4) And believe it or not, NYC actually has some decent beaches, perfect for those sweltering mid-August days where an afternoon spent trudging the melting asphalt doesn’t sound too pleasing. The Parks and Recreation site has a listing of beaches, including directions, for all beaches, the best and perhaps most scenic being Rockaway Beach, where you can even do a little surfing.

Have you ever noticed how people who live in cold cities simply go nuts in the summer, taking advantage of every sunny day and spending as much time as possible outside in the coveted sunlight (two examples I can think of: Montreal and Stockholm)?

Well, New York somewhat has the same phenomena, but for New Yorkers, the desire to escape their closet-sized apartments exists all year round. Luckily, there are some great spots, many of them new, that are outside and offer a little summer-like experience in a land of pavement and concrete. Here’s a roundup by the Guardian of 10 of their favorite such spots.

There’s some familiar suggestions, like Coney Island at #2, and some new options that are just opening or have just recently opened up, like The High Line at #3 — a sprawling elevated park built on an old train line — and #4, Governors Island, a former military base just a stone’s throw away from Lower Manhattan.

My suggestion, grab your mountain bike, hiking shoes, and/or binoculars and head to Brooklyn’s Prospect Park where, in just a few minutes, you can escape urban life and find yourself completely immersed in dense forest and lush vegetation. And the best part? You can still rest assured that an incredible sushi joint or tapas brunch is still just a short walk away. The best of both worlds.

It’s not exactly news that it’s nearly impossible to afford hotels in New York City (don’t even get me started on apartments) but who wants to pay hundreds of dollars a night in a city that doesn’t sleep? (It’s not like you’re going to sleep all that much while you’re there anyways.) Here’s a few tips to save save a few Dollars/Euros/Yen - whatever the kids are using these days.

For the truly thrifty there’s always Couchsurfing, which, at last check, had 278 people in Manhattan alone offering up their couches for you, the complete stranger.

On Craigslist you can find apartments for nightly rentals as low as $50 a night- cram four people in there and you’re sleeping for less than the cost of a Martini in the Meatpacking District. Besides Craigslist, there are at least 11 other sites listing vacation rentals around the city where you can slide by for under $100 (still a deal considering that the average rate for a room in the City in 2008 was up to $350).

Of course, if you want to shell out the dough to stay in a hotel there are a ton of options, including some cool, funky, new places like the Pod Hotel as seen in the video above. Make sure you check out the rooftop view on the video at 1:52 (also watch how happy Kelley gets when she makes it to the top bunk - she totally should’ve had a bunk bed when she was growing up). A quick look at the site shows a bunk bed room (romantic!) for $170/night over the Thanksgiving holiday — so only about $85 between you and your bunk buddy. I heard there’s a parade that Thursday morning too. Check it out, that is, if you’re awake by then.