The Bronx Museum of the Arts

General admission is free and has been for years — not "suggested donation", not free on a Tuesday. You walk in.

For a city where the big museums charge like theatres, a free contemporary art museum with a real collection is worth knowing about, and it is a fifteen-minute walk from Yankee Stadium.

The permanent collection concentrates on artists of African, Asian and Latin American descent, and on artists with a connection to the Bronx. It has been collecting seriously since the 1980s, well before that focus was fashionable.

The exhibition program is contemporary and changes several times a year, so what you see depends entirely on when you come. Check the current show before you make the trip.

The museum runs a free First Friday event — music, art-making, food and a bar, in the evening, aimed at the neighborhood rather than at visitors. In summer these run as a series, sometimes jointly with Wave Hill.

It's free, it's genuinely local, and it's one of the better ways to spend a Friday evening in the Bronx. There are also free family art-making days on set Saturdays.

The museum sits on the Grand Concourse, the Bronx's grand boulevard, which was modelled on the Champs-Élysées and is lined with one of the largest concentrations of Art Deco apartment buildings anywhere in the world.

Walk twenty minutes in either direction along the Concourse before or after. That's the other half of the visit and it costs nothing.