Building type
Museums, memorial sites, and cultural institutions form part of Manhattan's landmark collection.
Compare museum buildings along avenues and park edges, including the Met, Guggenheim, and American Museum of Natural History. Notice how their scale and entrances relate to the surrounding streets.
9 building histories
Museum · 1880; Fifth Avenue facade 1902; later additions
1000 5th Avenue, New York, NY
The Met opened at its present site in 1880, in a Gothic building designed by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould. Later additions surrounded that first structure. The familiar Fifth Avenue facade and Great Hall, designed...
Read the storyMuseum · 1929
1227 5th Avenue, New York, NY
The use of the Late Georgian Style of architecture for the Museum of the City of New York was appropriate for this structure. Dignified in appearance, symmetrical in plan, the five-story red brick building with white...
Read the storyMuseum · 1903-06
33 East 36th Street, New York, NY
The original building of the Pierpont Morgan Library,designed in the Italian Renaissance Eclectic Style, was built in 1906 to house Mr. Morgan's collection of paintings, sculpture and his valuable library. This...
Read the storyMuseum · 1956-59
1071 5th Avenue, New York, NY
Frank Lloyd Wright received the commission for the Guggenheim in 1943. The museum opened on October 21, 1959, six months after his death. Its spiral form proposed a different kind of art museum, with a continuous ramp...
Read the storyMuseum · 1886
Liberty Island, New York, NY
Dedicated on October 28, 1886, the Statue of Liberty was a gift from France to the United States. Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi designed the figure, Eiffel and Company developed its supporting framework, and Richard Morris...
Read the storyMuseum · 1874 onward; first building opened 1877
Central Park West & West 77th Street, New York, NY
The American Museum of Natural History opened its first building on this site in 1877. Designed by Vaux & Mould, it was later enclosed by additions. The long Romanesque Revival front on West 77th Street is the work of...
Read the storyMuseum · 1934-38
99 Margaret Corbin Drive, New York, NY
The Cloisters, designed by architect Charles Collens of the Boston firm of Allen, Collens & Willis, was completed in May 1936. It is a part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and houses a large portion of the Museum's...
Read the storyMuseum · 1913-14
1 East 70th Street, New York, NY
Henry Clay Frick commissioned Carrère & Hastings to design his Fifth Avenue home, built in 1913–14. The limestone mansion included a long picture gallery and a garden facing the avenue. Frick intended the house and art...
Read the storyMuseum · 1903-08 & 1937-38
170 Central Park West, New York, NY
Austerely classical in feeling, and displaying great dignity in its formal composition, this building is a fitting home for a distinguished society. It is designed in the Roman Eclectic style and solidly constructed in...
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