Best Museums in New York City: MoMA, Met & Brooklyn Gems

New York City's museum landscape is staggering in its breadth and ambition — home to institutions that define entire fields of collecting and scholarship, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the American Museum of Natural History to the Museum of Modern Art. The Met on Fifth Avenue's Museum Mile is America's most visited art museum — 5,000 years of art across 2 million square feet, with Egyptian temples, European old masters, and rooftop sculpture gardens that open seasonally with Manhattan skyline views. MoMA in Midtown has the world's greatest modern art collection: Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Rousseau's The Sleeping Gypsy, Van Gogh's Starry Night. The American Museum of Natural History on Central Park West houses the world's largest collection of dinosaur fossils. The Guggenheim's Frank Lloyd Wright spiral ramp-building on Fifth Avenue is as much an art experience as the collection inside. The Whitney Museum of American Art in the Meatpacking District focuses on contemporary American art in a spectacular Renzo Piano building. The Brooklyn Museum is the second-largest art museum in New York and far less crowded than Manhattan counterparts — Egyptian collection is outstanding.