IN CUNNINGHAM PARK at the eastern end of Queens, the Big Apple Circus is currently riding out the second half of its 38th season. Ninety percent of those who attend the circus come from not very far away — for years it has been one place where New Yorkers can reliably avoid tourists. But invariably, like so much else in the city that is appreciated by the people who live here, the circus is endangered, its finances depleted to the point that the current production may be the last ever staged.

On a recent morning, Paul Binder, a storyteller of the old school, pushed a piece of paper across the table in a bland conference room of a Downtown Brooklyn office building. The paper was an advertisement, created by a friend, with a picture of a bagel, outlining the problems currently confronting the institution. In 1981, the year that the Big Apple Circus, which Mr. Binder founded with Michael Christensen, began to pitch its tent behind Lincoln Center, the price of a bagel at Zabar’s was 35 cents. Now that same bagel was $1.66, the ad explained, and so by the logic of bagel math the average price of a ticket to the circus might have risen accordingly, from $25 in the early 1980s to $118 today. Instead it was $65. This was because the Big Apple Circus, conceived when the two men were itinerant jugglers who drove cabs and picked grapes, was born of something almost antithetical to material interest, a raw creative anarchy coupled with a desire to provide children, whether they were from Park Avenue or the South Bronx, a shared sense of cultural experience.

“Most people don’t realize that we are a nonprofit, and this is a big problem,” Will Maitland Weiss, the executive director of the circus, lamented a few days earlier in the same offices, the organization’s headquarters. Contributions provide, among other services, the funds for poor and disabled children to see the circus free. The tax status of the Big Apple Circus would be obvious to anyone who visited and took note of a television set, hanging up in a corner, seemingly from the era of “Knots Landing,” to which a VHS recorder remains attached.