A map of 113 museums, galleries and cultural tours in New York, with the exhibitions currently listed at each one, what a ticket costs, which days are free, and a running record of the places you have already seen.
Free for iPhone · No account · No ads
A general map will tell you that a museum exists, when it opens and how far away it is. It rarely tells you whether the visit is worth an afternoon. NYC Museum Atlas covers one subject only — museums, galleries, exhibitions and cultural tours — so every place in it has been read about, described and rated by people who write about the city for a living. You get a photograph of the building, the practical details, and a line explaining what the collection actually is.
Open the map or narrow the list by category, price, neighborhood, day of the week or what is open right now.
Compare the exhibitions on show, the ticket price, the free days and our rating before you commit to the trip.
Save what you want to see, mark what you have visited and hide the places that are not for you.
Zoomed out, the map reads as color-coded categories, so you can see at a glance where the art is dense and where the history museums sit. Zoom in and most pins turn into a photograph of the building itself. Many of New York's best collections are behind unmarked townhouse doors and lobby entrances, and a picture saves you the block you would otherwise walk twice.
New York has a genuinely large free museum scene, but the rules are scattered: some places never charge, some ask what you can give, and some open their doors for one evening a week. The Free tab gathers all three in one list, filtered by borough, with a short explanation of what pay-what-you-wish actually means when you reach the desk.
Checking what is on across a dozen institutions normally means a dozen websites. The app keeps the current exhibitions our editors have logged for each museum in a single feed, sorted so the strongest collections surface first, with dates and a short description. It is the fastest way to notice that the show you have been meaning to catch closes in three weeks.
Each card carries the practical layer — address, opening hours, closed days, ticket price, free days, whether tours are available — alongside our rating and a plain-language note on what the place is and who tends to enjoy it. The point is to settle the question before you spend an hour and a subway fare finding out.
Mark a place Visited once you have seen it, flag the ones you are Interested in, and hide what does not appeal so it stops competing for your attention. Over a year the list stops being a directory and becomes a personal map of the city — and a fairly clear picture of which neighborhoods you have been neglecting.
Filter by category, by ticket price, by the day you are actually free, by what is open at this hour, or by museums versus guided tours. You can also filter on your own labels to see only the places you have saved. A hundred-plus options become the two or three that fit this particular Saturday.
With a few days in the city, the cost of a bad choice is high: a museum that turned out to be one small room, a Monday closure nobody mentioned, a queue for a show you did not want to see. Sort by rating, check the hours and the current exhibitions, and put together an afternoon you will remember rather than one you settled for.
Beyond the famous institutions there are house museums, single-subject collections and neighborhood galleries that never make the guidebooks. Follow the exhibitions as they change, use the free evenings, keep a record of what you have already seen, and work your way outward from your own block into the rest of the boroughs.
NYC Museum Atlas is built by the team behind NYC-MAP.COM, an independent guide to museums and culture in New York. The site is written by Waso Danilenko and the NYC-MAP editors, who have spent years visiting and writing about the city's collections.
The Waso Rating is their judgment, expressed as a single number, and it is applied to the places we have written about rather than to every listing in the app. It reflects the strength of the collection and its exhibitions, the building itself, and whether the visit justifies the ticket — the same things you would weigh if a friend who knew the city well told you where to go. It is not a crowd average, and it does not move when a museum has a busy weekend.
When we have not formed an opinion, no rating is shown. That seems more useful than inventing one.
It looks like no other museum in the city — you can walk beneath the fountains of the memorial before you go in.
Yes. The app is free, there are no ads, and there is nothing to buy inside it.
No. There is no sign-up and no password. Your saved places and visit history stay on your iPhone.
Not yet. The current 113 listings cover Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, with Manhattan by far the most complete. Staten Island is not included at this stage.
Our editors maintain the listings and the app pulls the latest version when you open it. Museums change their schedules and pricing without much notice, so treat what you see as a well-kept reference rather than a live feed, and check the museum's own site before a trip that depends on it.
Yes. Mark places as Visited or Interested, hide the ones you are not going to, and watch how much of the list you have worked through.
Both, in different ways. Visitors use the ratings and hours to plan a short trip; residents tend to use the exhibition listings, the free days and the visit tracking over a much longer stretch of time.
No. NYC Museum Atlas is being built for iPhone only, and there is no Android version planned at the moment.
Opening hours, ticket prices and free-admission rules change often, and holiday schedules change more often still. Always check the museum's official website before you set out.
New York has more museums than anyone gets through in a lifetime. This is a way of choosing the next one well.
The app is in development and not yet on the App Store. It will be free when it arrives.
Follow NYC-MAP.COM for the release.