The Morgan Library & Museum — library building
Photograph by Mike Peel ( www.mikepeel.net ). · CC BY-SA 4.0

The Morgan Library & Museum

  • 2 min read
  • 40.749° N 73.982° W

Interesting facts

  • During the Panic of 1907, Morgan locked the heads of New York's banks and trust companies in the library overnight until they agreed a rescue plan.
  • Morgan planned white marble but switched to pinkish-grey Tennessee marble after a neighbour warned that white would make it look like a mausoleum.
  • He first hired Warren and Wetmore, who proposed an ornate Baroque design, before turning to McKim for something far more austere.
  • Thin metal sheeting was laid between the dry-jointed marble blocks to cope with New York's climate, and any cracked stone was rejected.
  • Workers were forbidden to talk to the press, and while it was being built the library was nicknamed Mr. Morgan's jewel case.
  • Shortly before completion, Morgan reportedly asked for the entire building to be shortened by one foot.
  • Over half of Morgan's $128 million estate lay in the value of his collection, on which he sometimes spent half his annual income.
  • At first only researchers were admitted, no more than ten at a time; the library opened to the general public only in 1942.
  • Building the 2006 expansion meant excavating nearly 50,000 tons of Manhattan bedrock, since most of the new space lies underground.
  • The collection includes a 1516 letter by Andrea Corsali containing the first known description of the Southern Cross.

Why it is worth it

The Morgan began as one man's private study and is still, at its heart, a building made for holding precious paper. J. Pierpont Morgan, the most powerful banker of his age, commissioned Charles McKim of McKim, Mead & White to house his books and manuscripts on Madison Avenue, and the library was built between 1902 and 1906. McKim gave it the look of an Italian Renaissance palazzo, low and severe, in pinkish-grey Tennessee marble. The blocks were cut so precisely that they were laid almost without mortar – a costly refinement that added around $50,000 to the bill and gives the walls their seamless, monolithic calm.

Inside, restraint gives way to splendour. The East Room, the library proper, rises through three tiers of bookcases to a ceiling painted by H. Siddons Mowbray with figures of great men of the past, muses and the signs of the zodiac, and above the fireplace hangs a sixteenth-century Flemish tapestry, the Triumph of Avarice, the sole surviving piece from a series on the Seven Deadly Sins designed by Pieter Coecke van Aelst. Across the marble rotunda lies the West Room, Morgan's own study, where he worked and received visitors. The rooms have kept their original fittings, and they are one of the best-preserved interiors of the American Gilded Age.

The collection matches the rooms. Morgan bought on a scale no private collector had attempted, and his librarian, Belle da Costa Greene, who joined him in 1905, shaped it into a research collection and ran it for four decades. Today the Morgan holds more than 350,000 objects: three Gutenberg Bibles, illuminated medieval manuscripts, master drawings, music manuscripts and literary autographs, among them Charles Dickens's manuscript of A Christmas Carol. Morgan's son made the library a public institution in 1924, eleven years after his father's death.

The site grew around the original building: an annex by Benjamin Wistar Morris in 1928, and in 2006 an expansion by Renzo Piano with Beyer Blinder Belle that linked the old buildings with a light-filled glass court and added new galleries. Piano's addition is deliberately quiet, so that McKim's marble still reads as the jewel at the centre of the block.

Getting there

The Morgan stands at 225 Madison Avenue at East 36th Street in Murray Hill, Manhattan, under a kilometre from Times Square and a short walk south of Grand Central Terminal. LaGuardia Airport (LGA) is about 10 km away in a straight line; John F. Kennedy (JFK) and Newark (EWR) also serve the city.

Plan your visit

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Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in New York 17The Most Beautiful Places in the United States 228The Most Beautiful Libraries in the United States 7The Most Beautiful Libraries 27The Most Beautiful Buildings in the United States 34The Most Beautiful Buildings 286

From the encyclopaedia

The Morgan Library & Museum is a museum and research library in New York City, New York, United States. Completed in 1906 as the private library of the banker J. P. Morgan, the institution is housed at 225 Madison Avenue in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan. As of 2024, the museum is directed by Colin B. Bailey and governed by a board of trustees.

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