The Metropolitan Museum of Art: New York's Greatest Museum

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the largest art museum in the Western Hemisphere and one of the most significant cultural institutions in the world — a collection of more than two million objects spanning five thousand years of human creativity in a building that has been growing continuously since its opening on Fifth Avenue in 1872. The museum's Beaux-Arts facade stretches an entire city block facing Central Park, and its interior is organized into 17 curatorial departments covering everything from Egyptian antiquities to contemporary art, European paintings to Japanese decorative arts, medieval armour to African sculpture. One visit can barely scratch the surface — a meaningful engagement with the collection requires days.

The Egyptian Wing alone contains 26,000 objects, including entire temples reconstructed inside the museum — the Temple of Dendur, donated by Egypt in 1965 and reassembled in a purpose-built glass pavilion, is one of the most extraordinary architectural transplants in museum history. The European Paintings galleries on the second floor constitute one of the world's greatest assemblages of Western art — Vermeer, Rembrandt, El Greco, Velázquez, and Caravaggio concentrated in rooms that justify the museum's reputation as one of the finest collections assembled anywhere.

The Costume Institute in the basement hosts the annual Met Gala exhibition, the most prestigious fashion show on earth, which is accessible to regular museum visitors throughout its run. The Cloisters, a separate branch of the museum in Fort Tryon Park in upper Manhattan, houses the medieval European collection in a building assembled from actual monastery cloisters brought from France and Spain — the Unicorn Tapestries alone justify the journey uptown. Admission is pay-what-you-wish for New York State residents; suggested admission for out-of-state visitors is charged at the entrance.