It's summer and school's out! No matter what age you are, you can spend your summer at the library with book lists and activities galore. We go over the facts and stats of BPL's popular Culture Pass program, which has helped thousands of New Yorkers visit museums and performance spaces in the city ... for free!
More resources:
- Reserve free passes to museums and performance sites across NYC with Culture Pass (and your library card)!
- Is there a kid or teen in your life? They can spend their summer at the library with fun events, activities and book lists.
- Visit Brooklyn Botanic Garden or New-York Historical Society and 100 other cultural institutions and performing arts spaces this summer with Culture Pass.
- Summer is a great time to get out and visit our libraries! If you haven't started the challenge yet, read about our new prizes for Browse the Branches, the initiative inspiring New Yorkers to visit all 62 BPL branches by the end of the year.
Check out these "Explore Your City" summer reading lists for adults, teens and kids of all ages.
Episode Transcript
Adwoa Adusei Hi, Virginia!
Virginia Marshall Hey, Adwoa!
Adwoa Adusei Happy summer!
Virginia Marshall Happy summer to you, too! New York City schools are letting out this week and kids across the five boroughs are gonna be let loose!
Adwoa Adusei In a safe way.
Virginia Marshall Yeah, yeah, in a safe way! And, they can spend their whole summer at the library. This summer, like every summer, BPL has tons of events and book lists and other fun challenges to encourage kids to use their library when school is out.
Adwoa Adusei You might know it as “Summer Reading” ... we’re calling it “Summer at the Library” this year, and the theme is "Explore Your City." So, for this episode we’re going to talk about how everyone—kids, teens, adults and older folks can use their library card to literally explore their city through museums and other cultural experiences ... and it’s all for FREE.
Virginia Marshall Wait, that sounds amazing.
Adwoa Adusei It is! Have you not heard of Culture Pass, Virginia?
Virginia Marshall I mean, I feel like I have ... but you should remind me.
Adwoa Adusei Um, yes. Of course. And I have two people here who can help me do that. Brendan Crain is the manager for Culture Pass here at Brooklyn Public Library ...
Brendan Crain Hi, Adwoa, it's great to be here.
Adwoa Adusei And Nedelka Sotelo also works on Culture Pass branch programing. Hi, Nedelka!
Nedelka Sotelo Hi! Thanks for having us.
Adwoa Adusei Today on Borrowed, we’ll be exploring our city. I’m Adwoa Adusei
Virginia Marshall And I’m Virginia Marshall. You’re listening to Borrowed: stories that start at the library.
[Theme music]
Adwoa Adusei So Brendan, I am in awe of the Culture Pass program and the incredible number of partnerships and programs you all offer. And I thought a good way to introduce listeners to Culture Pass is to do it with numbers!
Brendan Crain Sounds great to me.
Adwoa Adusei So let’s start off the list with the number one. All you need is one library card from any of the three library systems: Brooklyn Public Library, Queens Public Library, or New York Public Library. You can go to your local branch for help signing up or you can sign up online. Either way, you’ll be able to see and plan for trips to a variety of arts and cultural institutions. And it’s all free. Every partner institution decides how many free passes are available and how frequently. We’ll put a link in our show notes to the Culture Pass website and rules.
Brendan Crain Ok, let me try! the next number is five. You want to guess? Manhattan, the Bronx, Staten Island, Queens, and of course, our very own Brooklyn! It's the five boroughs. Culture Pass connects residents and cultural institutions in all five of the city's boroughs. You can visit the National Lighthouse Museum in Staten Island, the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, the Wyckoff House in Brooklyn, the Poster House Museum in Manhattan, the Music Heritage Center in the Bronx, anywhere you want to go. Nedelka, you want the next one?
Nedelka Sotelo Yes, please! The next number is 30. Culture Pass collaborates with 30 performance arts sites. The Arts, as we know, encompasses so much more than fine arts museums. Culture Pass shines a light on the wide array of spaces that offer live events like theater and opera. You can see a show at Carnegie Hall or Kings Theater with Culture Pass!
Brendan Crain Okay, this one's actually my favorite number about Culture Pass, so I'm glad I get to do it. The number is 75 percent. So, 75 percent—and this is across multiple surveys—75 percent of library patrons have used Culture Pass tell us that they have done so to visit a totally new cultural site or institution, so a place they've never been before. So that's telling us that patrons are literally using Culture Pass to “browse” the city’s cultural attractions just like they browse books at the library.
[Music fades out]
Adwoa Adusei So, the next number: 84. Over the past year, Culture Pass has held 84 programs at local branches throughout the city. For example, Culture Pass recently had a reptile and insect event at Marcy and Crown Heights Library with the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, and I saw that NYPL hosted a salsa class and an acting workshop with cultural institutions in the Bronx!
Brendan Crain Yeah! Culture pass not only gets folks out into the city ... we also bring the city and world class cultural organizations into your neighborhood library. Alright, so the next number—this is an exciting one—the next number is 100. Culture Pass officially now has 100 partner sites from such a huge variety of cultural venues. Our most recent additions include STREB Lab for Action Mechanics, the Central Park Conservancy, which is offering passes for their walking tours, the Center for Fiction, and our 100th member: the New-York Historical Society.
Adwoa Adusei That's right, we spoke with Wendy Nalani E. Ikemoto, Vice President and Chief Curator at the New York Historical Society.
[Music]
Wendy Nalani E. Ikemoto We're always looking for new ways to engage new audiences, established audiences, and especially for families, I think this is really important for us. So we'll have a special program on July 4th for children and families that will feature food from street vendors and posh ice cream flavors that would have been familiar to New Yorkers in 1776. A fan favorite that our visitors tend to love and flock to is our gallery of Tiffany lamps. This is a gallery that is an entire city block wide, and it is filled with this dazzling display of beautiful glass Tiffany lampshades illuminated in a dim interior. And the installation tells the story of Clara Driscoll and her so-called Tiffany girls, the women behind a lot of the famous Tiffany lamp shade designs.
[Music]
Brendan Crain Okay, so the next number is 8,600. That’s an average of 8,600 passes per month being utilized at partner sites. This number is up significantly from even pre-pandemic numbers. Before 2020, the average number of passes used per month was about 5,500.
Nedelka Sotelo And actually the organization in this borough that gives out the most passes in the summer is the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, which is a great place to visit during warmer weather. We talked to Leigh Williams who’s the director of visitor services at the garden.
Leigh Williams We had almost 5,000 people visit the garden last year using Culture Pass, which was just, you know, really great to see. And we're on track, I think, to sort of match that or surpass it this year. We as an institution really focus on access. We offer community tickets, which are free to anyone who asks for them any time we're open, no questions asked. I just so appreciate the work that's done by the library and Culture Pass to do outreach to local communities and make sure people know about it, and to offer this really great service. I'll give a shout out to some general highlights. Our Cranford Rose garden is in bloom right now and is going to be peaking in the next couple of weeks. And everybody gets very excited about the cherry blossoms, I don't blame them. They're gorgeous. But there's always something in bloom and there's always something special to see. And to me, the rose garden is like you're walking into a fairy tale storybook. It's just hundreds of varieties of roses popping out.
Adwoa Adusei That leads us to the next number: 100,000. NYC Culture Pass users are on track to surpass 100,000 reservations in a year for the first time ever! To reach that target by year’s end we need patrons to use 8,400 (or even more) each month from here on out. New Yorkers love a challenge, so I think we can do it.
Nedelka Sotelo To give scale to all of this, our next number is 320,000! That is, since the launch of Culture Pass in the summer of 2018, we have given out 320,000 passes. So, to reach almost 100,000 in one year is pretty epic.
Adwoa Adusei And last, but literally not least, our final number for you is 15 million. Fifteen million dollars is the estimated value of all passes that have been reserved by library patrons. I mean, talk about the value of your public library! Thanks so much, Brendan and Nedelka, for dropping by and sharing all of these facts and stats.
Brendan Crain My pleasure.
Nedelka Sotelo You’re welcome, thank you!
[Music]
Virginia Marshall Okay, I know so much more about Culture Pass now. That was great. Adwoa, is there anywhere you’re going to try to explore this summer?
Adwoa Adusei Yeah, I think I'm going to try to check out STREB Lab for Action Mechanics that Brendan mentioned? That seemed pretty cool, it's in Brooklyn, so ... what about you, Virginia?
Virginia Marshall Well, now that I know about Culture Pass, I’ve always wanted to visit the Museum of Chinese in America and the Noguchi Museum, which is in Queens. And it turns out I can reserve tickets with Culture Pass, so I’m looking forward to that.
Adwoa Adusei And you’re going to be leaving us for a bit this summer, right?
Virginia Marshall Yeah, not forever, but I’m going to be taking a bit of a break from podcasts and from BPL to work on my novel. And then I’ll be back in 2025 to produce another dedicated series like we did with Borrowed and Banned.
Adwoa Adusei Yes, it’s been so incredible to see how successful Borrowed and Banned was! We reached so many new listeners, we won a Webby Award, and were nominated for a Peabody Award.
Virginia Marshall That was incredible.
Adwoa Adusei It really was.
Virginia Marshall We’re still sort of in shock. But I think it speaks to the importance of the story. I hope listeners continue to support their libraries and stand against censorship. In the meantime, we want to take some time to figure out the next great thing for Borrowed. And you all, Adwoa, Fritzi and Ali, will keep putting out episodes once a month.
Adwoa Adusei We’ll hold down the fort while you’re away.
Virginia Marshall I have no doubt you will.
[Music]
Adwoa Adusei Borrowed is brought to you by Brooklyn Public Library. This episode was produced and hosted by Virginia Marshall and written and hosted by me, with help from Brendan Crain and Nedelka Sotelo. You can read a transcript of this episode and show notes, including information about Culture Pass and BPL’s Summer Reading campaign to "Explore Your City," at our website BKLYN Library [dot] org [slash] podcasts.
Virginia Marshall Brooklyn Public Library relies on the support of individuals for many of its most critical programs and services. To make a gift, please go to BKLYN Library [dot] org [slash] donate.
Adwoa Adusei Our Borrowed team is made up of Virginia Marshall, Ali Post, Fritzi Bodenheimer, Robin Lester Kenton, Damaris Olivo, and me, Adwoa Adusei. Jennifer Proffitt and Ashley Gill run our social media. Our music composer is Billy Libby. Meryl Friedman designed our logo.
Virginia Marshall We’ll be back next month with more stories that start at the library.