What to do in NYC when it rains

The way most people ruin a rainy day here is by planning it like a dry one. Three neighborhoods, four subway rides, a lunch reservation twenty blocks from the morning stop. Every transition is four minutes of sideways rain and a wet left shoulder, and by two in the afternoon you are making decisions based on how cold your feet are.

The fix is to pick one anchor: a building large enough to hold you for three hours whether or not you planned to stay that long. Everything else goes within a few blocks of it, or somewhere you can reach without leaving cover. One move, not five.

Before you commit, check the closing day. This is the single most common way a rainy afternoon collapses. The Met is closed Wednesdays. The Whitney is closed Tuesdays. The Brooklyn Museum and the Bronx Museum are both closed Mondays and Tuesdays. The Transit Museum runs Wednesday through Sunday. MoMA PS1 is closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays. MoMA and the American Museum of Natural History are open daily except Thanksgiving and Christmas, which is part of why they absorb so much of the city's bad weather.

Then buy the ticket before you leave, or on the platform. And check the institution's own visit page that morning. Hours, free windows and reservation rules change; anything on a guide page, including this one, is a starting point rather than a source of truth.

Three or four buildings in New York are large enough that you stop watching the weather. These are worth the entry cost precisely on the days you would otherwise be outside.

Several of the best indoor spaces in New York are ninety minutes at most. That is a planning fact, not a criticism. Pair them, or slot them into an afternoon that already has a shape.

New York has more continuous indoor walking than it advertises, and most of it is free. On a bad day these are the connective tissue that keeps you from getting soaked between stops.

Grand Central Terminal is open to the public from 5:15 am to 2 am, and you can spend an hour in it without buying anything. The zodiac ceiling in the Main Concourse holds twelve gold-leaf constellations and around 2,500 stars, painted, famously, backwards. In the northwest corner there is a small dark patch left unrestored during the 1990s cleaning, so you can see how filthy the whole thing was. The Whispering Gallery sits at the tiled arches by the Oyster Bar on the level below: two people face opposite corners, one whispers into the tile, and the other hears it clearly across the room over all the noise. It costs nothing and takes ninety seconds. Below that is the dining concourse and Grand Central Market, all of it indoors.

Downtown, the Oculus is the other great covered room. It sits on top of the World Trade Center PATH station and twelve subway lines, with a shopping concourse under the whole site. From the PATH station the West Concourse runs under West Street to Brookfield Place, a link the Port Authority opened specifically to connect the two, so you can cross one of the widest and least pleasant streets in Lower Manhattan without going outside. Add the National Museum of the American Indian a few blocks south and you have most of a rainy afternoon with very little sky in it.

For indoor markets, Chelsea Market at 75 Ninth Avenue runs a covered concourse through a full city block and keeps late hours daily. Essex Market at 88 Essex Street is a working public market rather than a food hall attraction, with produce and fish counters alongside the prepared food, and a much calmer place to stand around in wet shoes.

Free here means one of two things: permanently free, or free during a window everyone else also knows about. A permanently free museum at 2 pm on a Tuesday is quiet. A free window on a rainy Friday night is a line.

Permanently free: the National Museum of the American Indian, MoMA PS1, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts, which states plainly that admission to the museum and all its exhibitions and events is free for everyone. One caveat on the Bronx Museum, which caught me out: it closes between exhibitions for installation, sometimes for a month. Check the site before you make the trip.

Free windows worth planning around: the Whitney is free on Friday nights and the second Sunday of every month, and everyone twenty-five and under gets in free at any time. Its ground floor, including the Floor 1 gallery, lobby and shop, is always free, which makes it a legitimate place to regroup in the meatpacking district when the weather turns. MoMA's Friday evening is state residents only and requires a reservation. The Museum of the City of New York lets New York City residents pay what they can.

And the Staten Island Ferry, which the city runs free every day of the year between Whitehall and St. George. The cabin is enclosed and heated. A round trip through the harbor in weather is better than the same trip in sun, and it costs nothing.

Libraries get listed on rainy day roundups as a fallback, which undersells them. Two or three are destinations in their own right, and they solve the problem museums do not: you can sit for four hours without buying anything and nobody moves you along.

The Stephen A. Schwarzman Building at Fifth Avenue and 42nd is the marble one with the lions. The Rose Main Reading Room is open for research and quiet study, and if you only want to see the room rather than work in it, the library runs daily guided tours you can sign up for. The Polonsky Exhibition, drawn from the library's collections, is free with a timed ticket reserved in advance. Hours vary by day and the building closes earlier than people expect, so check the library's site before planning an evening around it.

The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library sits directly across Fifth Avenue at 40th Street and is the better choice if you want to stay put. It is the New York Public Library's largest circulating branch, open long hours seven days a week, with real seating and services for every age group. On a wet weekday afternoon it is the best free room in midtown.

In Brooklyn, the Central Library at Grand Army Plaza carries three floors of collections in more than thirty languages, plus a business and career center, an Info Commons with computers, a youth wing, and a cultural center where free programs run. It is fully accessible and a short walk from the 2 and 3 at Eastern Parkway, which matters when the walk is in rain.

The calculation with children is different: you need a place where noise is fine, where there is something physical to do, and where you can leave after ninety minutes without having wasted the admission price.

The New York Transit Museum is the strongest option in the city for this and the cheapest of the serious ones. Children two to seventeen are five dollars, the exhibits are vintage subway cars you climb into and sit in, and the whole thing is underground, so the trip in and out stays dry.

Brooklyn Children's Museum runs Wednesday through Sunday, and admission is free every Thursday from 2 to 5 pm. Check the calendar first: individual exhibits go offline for maintenance and the museum takes occasional multi-day closures.

At the Natural History Museum, general admission covers the permanent halls, which is where children want to be anyway. The planetarium and the butterfly vivarium cost extra and require a time slot, so decide on those before you buy rather than at the counter with a wet, impatient six-year-old.