New York · Upper East Side
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Five thousand years on Fifth Avenue, and a roof garden above the park
The Temple of Dendur, an Egyptian temple in a glass hall facing Central Park
Founded in 1870 by a group of New Yorkers who decided the city needed a museum and would build one before deciding what to put in it. A century and a half later it holds about a million and a half objects across two million square feet, and the honest advice is to pick two departments and ignore the rest.
The Temple of Dendur, given by Egypt in 1965 and installed in a glass hall with a reflecting pool, is the room everyone remembers. The American Wing, the arms and armour court and the Lehman collection are all first rate and all comparatively quiet.
The detail
Good to know
- Founded
- 1870
- Objects
- About 1.5 million
- Late nights
- Friday and Saturday until 21:00
- Roof garden
- Spring to autumn, with a bar
More in New York
Three more rooms in New York
MuseumFree hoursNew York · Midtown
MoMA
The museum that wrote the history of modern art, and hung it in the order it wrote
Opera houseBook aheadNew York · Lincoln Center
Metropolitan Opera
The largest repertory opera house in the world, with Chagall murals behind a glass front
Concert hallIconNew York · Midtown
Carnegie Hall
Built by a steel fortune in 1891, saved from demolition by a violinist in 1960
Museums
Elsewhere: museums
MuseumIconBerlin · Mitte
Museumsinsel
Five museums on one sandbank in the Spree, built to hold an empire's idea of itself
MuseumBerlin · Moabit
Hamburger Bahnhof
A nineteenth-century railway terminus holding the contemporary collection of the nation
MuseumFreeLondon · Bloomsbury
The British Museum
Eight million objects, two and a half centuries of argument and no admission charge