The Metropolitan Museum of Art

One of the world’s largest art museums, and the rough stone blocks above its columns are still uncarved

Local name: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Collection: New York · USA · Open in OpenStreetMap

Richard Morris Hunt’s facade on Fifth Avenue · Yair Haklai, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

The story

Before you is the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The idea was born in Paris in 1866, when a group of Americans agreed to create a national museum of art for their country. It was proposed by the lawyer John Jay. On the thirteenth of April 1870 the museum was incorporated. At first it occupied 681 Fifth Avenue, and its first object was a Roman sarcophagus. On the thirtieth of March 1880 the museum opened here, on the edge of Central Park. The first building, of red brick in the Gothic style, was designed by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould. One of its walls can still be seen inside, in the Robert Lehman Wing. The grand facade with its columns was designed by Richard Morris Hunt. He died in 1895, and his son, Richard Howland Hunt, finished the work. The facade and the Great Hall opened in December 1902. Look at the tops of the columns. Rough blocks of stone sit above them. They were meant to be carved into sculpture groups, but the money ran out and the stones were never carved. The side wings were added later by the firm of McKim, Mead & White. Today the building is more than twenty times the size of the first one and stretches almost a quarter mile along Fifth Avenue. The collection spans five thousand years of art: there is a whole Egyptian temple, the Temple of Dendur, and five paintings by Vermeer.

Visiting

1000 Fifth Avenue, at 82nd Street. Open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and until 9 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays; closed on Wednesdays. Closed on Thanksgiving, December 25, January 1 and the first Monday in May. Admission is paid; tickets can be bought in advance on the museum’s website. The step-free entrance is at 81st Street and Fifth Avenue.