Spring hit different this week. AMNY’s weekend roundup packed the April 17-19 calendar with enough variety that even the most schedule-resistant New Yorker has no excuse to stay home.
Let’s start Friday. The oyster shucking class at Pier 57, 25 11th Ave. in Manhattan, runs 6 to 8 p.m. and costs $75 per person. You’ll get a history lesson alongside hands-on practice with a shucking knife, and the ticket includes one glass of wine, whether that’s bubbly, white, or red. Additional pours run $10 each. It’s a two-hour block on a Friday evening, and honestly, learning a skill you can actually show off at a dinner party beats another scroll-until-midnight situation by a wide margin.
Also on Friday, the International Studio and Curatorial Program throws open its doors for the 2026 Spring Open Studios at 1040 Metropolitan Ave. in Manhattan. Thirty-two artists and curators from 25 countries are currently in residence there, and the event runs 6 to 9 p.m. Free. That’s a three-hour window of international contemporary art that costs you nothing but the subway fare to get there.
Saturday’s headliner is the Greenwich Village Literary Pub Crawl, and if you haven’t done this one, you’re missing something genuinely fun. The tour runs three hours, starting at The Four Faced Liar at 165 W. 4th St. at 2 p.m. and wrapping at 5 p.m. Tickets are $49. Guides walk you through three historic Village bars, reading stories, poems, and prose from the writers who shaped American literature in those exact neighborhoods. Dylan Thomas drank himself to death a few blocks away. Eugene O’Neill haunted the White Horse. The Village didn’t just inspire literature; it absorbed it. “It’s one of those experiences where you realize how many ghosts are still in these walls,” one longtime participant told AMNY, describing the crawl as more immersive than any museum tour they’d taken.
That same Saturday, Albee Square in Downtown Brooklyn goes car-free for Earth Day 2026, noon to 3 p.m. Music, bike lessons, fashion, and other activities fill the Albee Square W. and Fulton St. block. It’s free. Bring the kids, lock up the car keys, and don’t feel guilty about it.
Free. Worth repeating.
Sunday carries the Earth Day momentum into two very different directions.
The Queens Zoo hosts its Earth Day Extravaganza from 5 to 8 p.m. at 53-51 111th St. in Queens. Tickets run $36. The evening program focuses on hands-on engagement, including native plant planting and park stewardship, and the zoo’s wildlife setting gives the whole thing a context you can’t fake in a conference room. The Wildlife Conservation Society, which operates the Queens Zoo, has pushed native habitat education hard over the past few years, and this event fits squarely into that work.
Then there’s the Sunday outlier: a screening of Monty Python and the Holy Grail at United Palace, 4140 Broadway in Manhattan, from 3 to 5:30 p.m. Ten dollars. The print comes courtesy of the American Genre Film Archive, projected on DCP, and the runtime clocks in at 1 hour and 31 minutes. Rated PG, which means you can bring whoever. United Palace is a stunning venue for a film like this, a 1930s movie palace with ornate details that make the medieval absurdism land even harder when you’re watching Arthur and his knights clop around on imaginary horses. It doesn’t connect to Earth Day in any meaningful way, and that’s exactly the point.
Five borough coverage means NYC Parks’ event calendar is always worth a parallel check if you want to layer in outdoor programming before or after any of these events.
The through line across the weekend, if you’re looking for one, is that none of these cost a fortune. The priciest single ticket in the bunch is the oyster class at $75. Everything else comes in at $49 or under, and two events are completely free. For a city that can drain a wallet before noon on a Saturday, that’s a lineup worth paying attention to, whether you’re coming in from Staten Island on the 7:30 a.m. ferry or walking over from the West Village to catch your first shucking lesson of the spring.