To strengthen its social fabric, a city must have places where people of all backgrounds and generations can convene and bond over the shared history and common humanity found in the arts and sciences.

Here in New York City, free admission to 17 of the city’s landmark cultural institutions was promised to us at the founding of these institutions in return for us paying their rent. And New Yorkers have been paying – but we are being denied our legal right to access museums, zoos, gardens and other institutions on public land freely.

In the mid-1800s, when famed architectural duo Olmsted and Vaux began designing what would become Central Park, the project’s Board of Governors understood that achieving their vision would take decades and require immense financial support.

Board member Andrew Greene, who at the time headed New York City’s Board of Education, saw and understood the juxtaposition between the financial enormity of the enterprise and the emerging need for a bolstered education system. He began to envision Central Park as a cultural and educational center itself.

The city’s growing cohort of industrialists, meanwhile, wanted to bolster New York’s prominence as a cultural capital on the world stage — and prepare the influx of immigrants to the city for citizenry and work.

In 1931, Olmsted, Vaux and Greene’s plan was published through the Municipal Arts Society, laying out what Green understood as the quid pro quo needed to ensure success: a public-private partnership. The city’s wealthiest families would provide their private collections of art and artifacts for public viewing, housing them in city-owned buildings situated on public parkland, where they would be better protected from the risk of fires. The public would subsidize their rent-free use of these buildings in return for free admission to them.

This partnership resulted in a “Park Education Campus” — eventually encompassing 17 museums, performing arts and science centers, botanical gardens, zoos and aquariums across the city — which transformed New York’s reputation and set it on the path to being its envisioned social beacon.

Fearing the corruption that plagued Tammany Hall at the time, philanthropists sought to codify Greene’s public-private partnership through state-level legislative action. While they succeeded in doing so, their fears were nevertheless realized in the time since. State legislators were gradually stripped of their oversight through new agreements between the institutions and the city.

Now, many years later and under this questionable authority, the 17 public-private institutions operate rent-free while New Yorkers are denied the legislated reciprocity of free admission.

With New York again facing challenges similar to those presented at the time of the Park Education Campus’s founding, it’s time we make sure that the state makes good on the letter and spirit of the public-private partnership.

In addition to the influx of new immigrants, increasing desire for opportunities for public instruction and growing demand for access to shared community and common experiences, the city’s public education system needs bolstering — beyond what can be offered through traditional classroom instruction.

Last year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress revealed that only 31% of the state’s young people are proficient in reading by the eighth grade. Worse, “economically disadvantaged” students had an average score that was 23 points lower than the average score for those who were not. And in New York, as in states across the country, teachers and parents report that their children are having severe difficulties staying engaged in their classroom lessons, due to the omnipresence of digital distractions. Students themselves agree and are hungry for different kinds of learning experiences.

Greene’s foundational aspirations for the Park Education Campus give us an apt and inspiring North Star. New Yorkers shouldn’t have to plan months in advance or rearrange their weeks just to be able to go to the Bronx Zoo on the one day it offers free admission each week. And while the Metropolitan Museum of Art allows New Yorkers to pay what they wish, these “suggested donation fees” create an ultimately prohibitive dynamic between taxpayers and the institution that they’re already subsidizing.

Every New Yorker, wherever they are in the city, should be able to decide on a whim to visit the Park Education institution nearest to them, present an ID or a culture card and be granted admission freely. When we enter the American Museum of Natural History or the Brooklyn Museum, we should know that these institutions are ours.

This post was originally published on Next City.