Downtown Alliance

The Golden Thread: New Adventures in Textile Art by Christian Viveros-Fauné
2025-04-11 00:00 - 2026-05-16 00:00 (America/New_York)
Fiber art exhibition with multiple artists.

Metamorphosis: Chinese Imagination and Transformation
2025-09-10 00:00 - 2026-01-11 00:00
Opening day of a new exhibition that highlights works by 28 contemporary artists of Chinese descent, who explore themes of personal, cultural, historical and material metamorphosis in dynamic and innovative ways. Across painting, sculpture, photography, animation and installation art, these works by established and emerging artists of different generations and backgrounds use experimentation to draw on both Eastern and Western art-making practices and materials. Many of the works will be seen in the U.S. for the first time. Important commissions include new paintings by Sun Xun and an immersive Dream Chamber by Bingyi. The exhibition is organized very loosely around four themes: “Metamorphosis of the Body and Self”, “Metamorphosis of the Environment and Natural World”, “Historical and Cultural Metamorphosis”, and “Spiritual Metamorphosis”.

Twilight Tour: Death in New York
2025-10-30 19:30 - 21:15
Explore stories of burial grounds, executions, epidemics, and forgotten dead as the city transitions from day to night!

Smorgasburg
2024-04-05 11:00 - 18:00
New York City’s favorite outdoor food market, Smorgasburg, is back at the World Trade Center. Starting on April 5, on Fridays through October, come out to Fulton Street and enjoy a variety of eats and treats from over 20 local vendors.

Garden Stewardship at Gotham Park
2025-11-01 10:00 - 12:00
Pick up trash and tend to pollinator-friendly gardens. No experience is necessary; all ages and abilities are welcome!

Brutalism: Ugly or Cool?
2025-11-01 10:30
Brutalism: Ugly or Cool? Brutalism was a popular style in architecture in the 1950s and 60s that used rough concrete to make fortress-like forms. Kids will learn about this expressive architecture that has so many fans and foes today. Join us to discover some of the world’s most iconic (and most disliked) Brutalist buildings and then design your own! Reservation required.

Shibu's Tail
2025-11-01 12:00
Tess Thomas, author of Shibu’s Tail will share stories about Shibu the cat. KIds can create their own Shibu-inspired art after the reading. Hosted by Yvonne Brooks. Great for all ages.

Yoga at Gotham Park
2025-11-01 12:00 - 13:00
All-levels class for skaters, gardeners, park enthusiasts—and anyone who wants to join. No experience needed.

Stone Street Halloween Bar Fest
2025-11-01 14:00 - 20:00
Halloween-themed happy hour at 10+ outdoor bars, with drink specials, games, photo booths, and contests. Costumes are encouraged.

The Outlaws Who Built NYC Tour
2025-11-01 15:00 - 17:00
Forget the gangland clichés. This walking tour uncovers the radical, corrupt, and wildly enterprising figures who shaped New York City, from pirate captains and Wall Street bombers to bank fraudsters, rogue publishers, and NYPD whistleblowers. It’s a crash course in how NYC was built not just by power and politics, but by those who bent the rules, challenged authority, and sometimes blew things up.
This tour isn’t about mob bosses and speakeasies. It’s about the deeper, dirtier truths behind the institutions that still define New York City today.

Alita Moses
2025-11-01 17:00
Musical performance.

Icons of Culture: Laura Brown and Kristina O’Neill
2025-11-01 18:00
After losing their high-profile publishing jobs, Laura Brown and Kristina O’Neill wrestled with the professional and personal challenges that come after job loss. Now, with All the Cool Girls Get Fired, they’re helping readers reframe work, success, and self-worth and navigate unexpected career change. The duo will offer advice, tackle audience questions, and spotlight other famous cool girls who soared after being fired in this interactive session. And all ticketholders will take home their own copy of All the Cool Girls Get Fired.

Miranda Joan
2025-11-01 19:00

Icons of Culture: Danai Gurira
2025-11-01 20:00
From Alexandria to Wakanda, Danai Gurira has played larger than life heroes in some of this generation’s most seminal pop culture works. But her work beyond the screen—lifting unheard voices and fighting to end poverty and HIV/AIDS—is her most heroic work. She shares that journey and reveals how we can all be heroic in our own lives.

Sea Chanteys and Maritime Music
2025-11-02 14:00
Singers of all levels, as well as listeners, are welcome to join in the choruses throughout the free Chantey Sing, lead or request a song in the round-robin, or just listen.

Sinister Secrets of the Seaport Walking Tour
2025-11-02 14:30
90-minute walking tour that takes you on a winding journey to unravel the darker past of the South Street Seaport Historic District and Lower Manhattan. This entertaining tour tells the scandalous, dubious, and sinister tales lurking in the cobblestone streets, historic buildings, and waterfront.

Stories Survive: “I Seek A Kind Person” Book Talk
2025-11-03 14:00
I Seek A Kind Person is a gripping family memoir of grief, courage, and hope that tells the hidden stories of children who escaped the Holocaust, building connections across generations and continents. In 1938, Jewish families are scrambling to flee Vienna. Desperate, they take out advertisements offering their children into the safe keeping of readers of a British newspaper, the Manchester Guardian. The right words in the right order could mean the difference between life and death. 83 years later, Guardian journalist Julian Borger comes across the ad that saved his father, Robert, from the Nazis. Robert had kept this a secret, like almost everything else about his traumatic Viennese childhood, until he took his own life. Drawn to the shadows of his family’s past and starting with nothing but a page of newspaper ads, Borger traces the remarkable stories of his father, the other advertised children, and their families, each thrown into the maelstrom of a world at war. From a Viennese radio shop to the Shanghai ghetto, internment camps and family homes across Britain, the deep forests and concentration camps of Nazi Germany, smugglers saving Jewish lives in Holland, an improbable French Resistance cell, and a redemptive story of survival in New York, Borger unearths the astonishing journeys of the children at the hands of fate, their stories of trauma and the kindness of strangers.

Walls of the Mind with Anand Pandian
2025-11-03 16:30
Americans have profoundly different ideas about what is real, ideas that sometimes verge on the irreconcilable. These notions depend on walls of the mind: stubborn boundaries that work to enforce particular points of view, as if each of us was stranded on some other island of idiosyncratic thought. Such divides may seem fleeting and intangible, but they are just as hard as any wall made of brick or concrete. Drawing on lessons from a recently published book—Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to Take Them Down—this talk will explore barriers that run through the experience of collective life in the United States, and what it takes instead to open our minds to the lives of others.

Mah Jongg & More
2025-11-04 14:00 - 16:00
Join a dedicated group of adult American Mah Jongg enthusiasts for friendly and informal games, or try your hand at other card and board games. Make friends and catch up with neighbors. Sets, cards, and games provided, or bring your own.

Zumba at Gotham Park
2025-11-04 17:30
Open to all—no experience needed, just come ready to dance and have fun.

Pipes: David Hurd
2025-11-04 18:00 | Trinity Church
Trinity organists past and present — Bruce Neswick and Alcée Chriss III — team with Trinity Choir to spotlight the artistry of another former Trinity organist: the incomparable David Hurd. A leading composer and organist in Episcopal church music for decades, Hurd will direct his own choral works, which blend spiritual depth and bold harmonies.

Art on the Move: NYC’s Iconic Subway Murals
2025-11-04 18:30
China Institute and Asia Art Archive in America bring together Asian and Asian Diasporic artists Bing Lee, Jean Shin, Saya Woolfalk, and Parker Fay (who will represent Ming Fay) to share the stories behind their own subway commission projects while addressing questions around the possibilities, promise, and practicalities of public art. The conversation will be moderated by Deputy Director of MTA Art & Design Yaling Chen. NYC’s subway stations have long been sites of large scale commissions, viewed on a daily basis by hundreds of thousands of city residents, commuters, and visitors. These artworks, commissioned by MTA Art & Design, are often linked to their location’s history, architecture, and/ or community context.

“The Tourist’s Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City” Book Talk
2025-11-05 19:00
The Tourist’s Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City offers a new look at over a century of New York’s history of Yiddish popular culture. Henry H. Sapoznik – a Peabody Award-winning co-producer of NPR’s Yiddish Radio Project – tells the story in over a baker’s dozen chapters on theater, music, architecture, crime, Black Americans and Jews, restaurants, real estate, and journalism. Culled from over five thousand Yiddish and English newspaper articles of the period, and thanks to new research from previously inaccessible materials, the book reveals fresh insights into the impossible-to-overstate influence of Yiddish culture on New York City. Containing fifty images, many of which have never before been published, the book is complemented by an online interactive Google Map linked to over one hundred of the historic locations discussed in the book, with additional graphics and resource materials. The Tourist’s Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City is a vivid, entertaining, and accessible compendium of both New York’s and New York’s Ashkenazic past and present, showcasing the culture’s persistent resiliency. Sapoznik will be in conversation about his book with Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett.

Fiber Art Crafts Studio
2025-11-06 13:00 - 15:00
Join this group of fiber art crafters for a fun afternoon of creativity and camaraderie. Bring your projects, which can include—but are not limited to—knitting, crocheting, embroidery and small-loom weaving.

Girls Write Now 2025 Anthology Launch
2025-11-06 18:00
Girls Write Now is a nationally award-winning nonprofit, media incubator, and multi-generational community.

In the Bones
2025-11-06 18:00
Book reading and signing by Lev AC Rosen, author of Mirage City.

Fresh Prints
2025-11-06 18:00
This open house will feature a breadth of printing equipment that you will be invited to use. You’ll get to see how the designers at Bowne lock up limited edition designs that showcase some of the more eccentric parts from the Seaport Museum’s printing and graphic arts collection. Established in 1775, the original Bowne & Co., Inc. was one of New York’s oldest printing firms. The Bowne & Co. that you can experience today at the Seaport Museum is an offshoot of the original and continues the age-old tradition of job (or small batch) printing.

Wild Hope: Mission Impossible
2025-11-06 18:00 - 19:30
Screening of Wild Hope: Mission Impossible, a film that highlights the late-career epiphany of renowned scientist Pat Brown, who abandoned his academic career to fight global warming and biodiversity collapse. Against all odds, he developed the revolutionary and delicious plant-based Impossible Burger, which has had a profound impact on the global food industry. Followed by a Q&A with Pat Brown.

Stories of Service: Honoring Veterans in Their Own Words
2025-11-06 18:00 - 20:00
An evening of storytelling in collaboration with The Moth, featuring the personal stories of veterans whose experiences reflect the many dimensions of military service. Crafted during a Moth storytelling workshop held earlier this fall in partnership with the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, these stories will offer authentic accounts of sacrifice, heroism, and compassion from those who served, all shared live and without notes on stage in the Museum Auditorium.

Native American Heritage Month Celebr
2025-11-06 18:00 - 20:00
Dance, film and storytelling that honors Indigenous voices and traditions from around the world.
