Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art occupies almost a quarter of a mile of Fifth Avenue along the eastern edge of Central Park, and inside it holds something close to the whole history of art. Founded in 1870 by a group of businessmen, artists and philanthropists who wanted a national institution for the public, it now lists some 1.5 million works across 17 curatorial departments, from Palaeolithic flints to contemporary painting. With about 5.7 million visitors in the 2025 financial year it was the most visited museum in the United States, and by floor area it is the largest art museum in the Americas.

The building is itself a history of American taste. The first structure, a red-brick Gothic Revival hall of 1880 by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould, is now swallowed inside more than twenty later additions. The Beaux-Arts Fifth Avenue façade, the Great Hall and the Grand Stairway were designed by Richard Morris Hunt and his son Richard Howland Hunt around 1900, McKim, Mead and White added the side wings in 1910, and the glass-walled galleries at the back are by Roche-Dinkeloo. The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden sits on the roof near the south-west corner.

No single visit can cover it, so choose. The Temple of Dendur, a sandstone Egyptian temple given to the United States in 1965 to save it from the waters of the Aswan High Dam, stands in a glass-walled gallery beside a reflecting pool that faces the park. The Astor Court, opened in 1981, is a Ming-style scholar's garden courtyard modelled on the Garden of the Master of the Nets in Suzhou. The Arms and Armor galleries, among the museum's most popular, are led by a cavalcade of armoured horsemen. Assyrian guardian figures from the palace of Ashurnasirpal II stand in the Near Eastern galleries, and the Michael C. The Rockefeller Wing shows arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, including towering memorial poles carved by the Asmat people of New Guinea. The European paintings, the American Wing with its period rooms, and the Costume Institute, which since 2026 has a permanent space beside the Great Hall, are worlds of their own.

The Met also runs The Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park in northern Manhattan, a museum of medieval European art opened in 1938 that incorporates parts of five French cloisters.

Getting there

The main building is at 1000 Fifth Avenue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, New York City, at the edge of Central Park. LaGuardia Airport (LGA) is about 8 km away, Newark Liberty (EWR) about 20 km and John F. Kennedy International (JFK) about 22 km.