Explore New York

Mercer Labs is a museum of art and technology at Church and Dey Streets near the World Trade Center, in part of the former Century 21 store. Created by Roy Nachum and Michael Cayre and opened in 2024, it has fifteen rooms of projections, holograms of suspended LEDs, spatial sound and a robotic arm that draws pictures in sand.

The 9/11 Memorial & Museum at the World Trade Center site remembers the 2,977 people killed in the attacks of 11 September 2001 and the six killed in the 1993 bombing. Two square reflecting pools designed by Michael Arad mark the footprints of the Twin Towers, with the names of the victims cut into bronze parapets. The museum below documents the attacks and their aftermath.

Federal Hall on Wall Street marks the site where George Washington took the oath as the first US president in 1789. The present Greek Revival building, designed by Ithiel Town and Alexander Jackson Davis, was completed in 1842 as the Custom House. The National Park Service runs it as a museum, with Washington's statue on the steps.

The Museum at Eldridge Street occupies the Eldridge Street Synagogue on the Lower East Side, built in 1887 by Eastern European Jewish immigrants and designed by the Herter brothers in the Moorish Revival style. After decades of decline it was restored by 2007; the sanctuary has a stained-glass rose window by Kiki Smith and Deborah Gans from 2010.

The Museum of Jewish Heritage in Battery Park City is a museum and a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, opened in 1997. Its six-sided main building by Roche-Dinkeloo recalls the six million Jews who were murdered. Exhibitions trace Jewish life in the 20th and 21st centuries, before, during and after the Holocaust.

The Tenement Museum occupies two 19th-century tenement buildings at 97 and 103 Orchard Street on Manhattan's Lower East Side, where some 15,000 people from more than 20 countries lived between 1863 and 2015. Guided tours lead through restored apartments that tell the stories of immigrant families who lived there.

The Whitney Museum of American Art collects 20th- and 21st-century American art and was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Since 2015 it has occupied a building by Renzo Piano at the southern end of the High Line, with galleries and outdoor terraces facing the Hudson. It holds a large Edward Hopper collection and stages the Whitney Biennial.

Museum of Illusions New York is an interactive museum at Eighth Avenue and West 14th Street with more than 60 exhibits on optical illusions, perception and the brain. It opened in 2018 as part of a chain founded in Zagreb in 2015, inside the Neoclassical New York County National Bank Building of 1907, a city landmark.

The Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration fills the main building of the former immigration station in New York Harbor, through which about 12 million immigrants passed between 1892 and 1954. The building opened in 1900 and reopened as a museum in 1990; the restored Registry Room and the exhibitions tell the story of arrival. The island is reached by ferry.

The Morgan Library & Museum began as the private library of the banker J. P. Morgan, built by Charles McKim between 1902 and 1906 on Madison Avenue. It became a public institution in 1924 and shows illuminated manuscripts, rare books, music manuscripts and drawings in the original library rooms and in a glass extension by Renzo Piano.

Madame Tussauds New York is a wax museum on 42nd Street in Times Square, opened in November 2000 and run by Merlin Entertainments. Its themed rooms show life-size wax figures of actors, musicians, athletes and politicians, with sets such as a Broadway stage and the Oval Office where visitors pose beside the figures.

The Museum of Broadway, at 145 West 45th Street near Times Square, tells the history of Broadway theatre over more than 300 years. It opened in November 2022. A map room with a film shows where the theatres stand, a two-floor timeline displays costumes and props from hundreds of productions, and a section explains the jobs behind a show.

The Intrepid Museum is a military, aerospace and maritime museum aboard USS Intrepid, a Second World War aircraft carrier moored at Pier 86 on the Hudson River since the museum opened in 1982. Its flight and hangar decks display dozens of aircraft and the Space Shuttle Enterprise, and the pier holds a Concorde and the submarine USS Growler.

The Paley Museum is the New York home of the Paley Center for Media, founded in 1975 by CBS founder William S. Paley as the Museum of Broadcasting. Since 1991 it has occupied a building by Philip Johnson at 25 West 52nd Street. Visitors watch programmes from a library of about 160,000 television and radio shows, see exhibitions and attend screenings.

The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, housed in a Beaux-Arts building by McKim, Mead & White that dates from 1897. Its collection of about 500,000 objects ranges from ancient Egyptian art to African, Asian and European works and American art from the colonial period to the present.

The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum on West 53rd Street in Midtown Manhattan, founded in 1929 by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan. It moved to its present site in 1939. The collection runs from the late 19th century to today and covers painting, sculpture, architecture, design, photography and film.

MoMA PS1 is a contemporary art institution in Long Island City, Queens, housed in a Romanesque Revival public school building from the 1890s. Founded in 1971 by Alanna Heiss and affiliated with the Museum of Modern Art since 2000, it shows changing exhibitions and hosts performances and summer music events in its courtyard.

Spyscape is an interactive museum about espionage at 928 Eighth Avenue in Midtown, with interiors designed by David Adjaye. Its galleries cover code-breaking, deception, surveillance, hacking and special operations, and visitors take tests of skills such as observation and risk-taking that end with a spy profile. A separate game zone, SPYGAMES, adds physical challenges.

The Society of Illustrators, founded in 1901, is a professional association of illustrators based in a townhouse on East 63rd Street on the Upper East Side. Its Museum of Illustration shows changing exhibitions of illustration, comics and cartoon art, including work from the society's annual competitions; the society also runs the MoCCA Arts Festival.

The Frick Collection is an art museum in the Fifth Avenue mansion built for the industrialist Henry Clay Frick, opened to the public in 1935. Its rooms show European paintings, sculpture and decorative art from the 14th to the 19th century, including works by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Titian and Goya. The house reopened in 2025 after a renovation.