The Village Trip returns for its eighth year with ten days of concerts, walking tours, talks and kids’ workshops spread across Greenwich Village, the East Village and the Lower East Side. An opening ceremony and party lands Thursday, Sept. 24, then the main run goes through Sunday, Oct. 4. This year’s theme is “Revolutionary Voices,” tied to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, which means the festival’s usual habit of treating the neighborhood as a political place is unusually explicit — Thomas Paine, Woody Guthrie, Dorothy Day and Paul Robeson are all anchors of the program.

  • Dates: opening ceremony Thu Sept. 24; main festival Fri Sept. 25 through Sun Oct. 4. 42 events total.
  • Where: Greenwich Village, East Village and Lower East Side — most events are walkable from one another.
  • Cost: five events are free. Concerts and tours generally run $10–$60.
  • Free events: “Framing the Village,” the festival’s fifth art exhibition (gallery open most days until 3 p.m.); the Declaration of Independence roundtable (Sat Sept. 26); the Dorothy Day and Catholic Worker houses event (Tue Sept. 29); the Who Are We? kids’ songwriting workshop (Sat Oct. 3, ages 6–12); and the Slambovian Circus of Dreams at Gansevoort Plaza (Sat Oct. 3), the festival’s signature free show.
  • Walking tours: East Village Underground; Thomas Paine’s Greenwich Village; a 1960s and ’70s West Village music tour through the Dylan and Springsteen-era venues; a Beat poets tour through the Bowery.
  • Kids: Woody Guthrie’s Songs to Grow On, Sept. 26, ages 2–5; Who Are We? songwriting workshop, Oct. 3, ages 6–12; Ich Bin Ein New Yorker, Oct. 4, built on Leonard Bernstein’s Ode to Freedom and excerpts from West Side Story.
  • The big ticketed night: the Greenwich Village Folk Festival’s 40th anniversary closes the festival Oct. 4, 4–9 p.m. at The Great Hall at Cooper Union — 20 artists including Suzanne Vega, Noel Paul Stookey, Guy Davis and John McCutcheon, $50–$60.
  • Plan: the full day-by-day schedule is at thevillagetrip.com. Tours and the folk festival are the things that sell out; the free events are mostly walk-up.

Two things make this worth blocking out time for. The free events sit on the history rather than beside it — the Dorothy Day walk goes to the Catholic Worker houses she ran on the Lower East Side, and the Slambovian Circus of Dreams plays an open plaza with no ticket line. And the tours are the rare version of neighborhood history that starts with the Wobblies, the Beats and the folk revival instead of brownstones and real estate.

If you pick one paid thing, make it a walking tour early in the run — the Paine and East Village Underground tours are the ones that reframe streets you already walk past — and keep Oct. 4 open for the folk festival if you want the 40-year bookend.