Explore New York

New York Historical is a museum and research library of American and New York history, founded in 1804 as the city's first museum and known as the New-York Historical Society until 2024. Since 1908 it has occupied a granite building by York & Sawyer on Central Park West, where exhibitions draw on its collections of documents, paintings and objects.

The American Museum of Natural History stands on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, across the street from Central Park. It opened in 1871, and its first building in today's Theodore Roosevelt Park followed in 1877. The complex now has 21 connected buildings with 45 permanent exhibition halls, dinosaur fossils, wildlife dioramas and a planetarium.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, founded in 1870, stands at 1000 Fifth Avenue on the eastern edge of Central Park. Its collection of about 1.5 million works spans ancient Egypt and the Near East, Greek and Roman art, European Old Masters, Asian, African and American art and modern works, arranged in 17 curatorial departments.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is an art museum on Fifth Avenue at 89th Street, founded in 1939 as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting. Its building by Frank Lloyd Wright, completed in 1959, wraps a spiral ramp around a skylit rotunda. The collection spans Impressionist, early modern and contemporary art, including the Thannhauser Collection.

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is the Smithsonian Institution's design museum, housed in the Andrew Carnegie Mansion of 1902 on Fifth Avenue's Museum Mile. Founded in 1897 by the Hewitt sisters, it collects historic and contemporary design, from textiles and wallpaper to furniture, posters and digital work, and has a garden.

The Museum of the City of New York tells the history of the city and its people through exhibitions, photographs, costumes and objects. It was founded in 1923 and moved in 1930 into a neo-Georgian brick building by Joseph H. Freedlander on Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street, facing Central Park at the northern end of Museum Mile.