Explore New York

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.

Brooklyn Botanic Garden is a 21-hectare botanical garden in central Brooklyn, opened in 1911 beside Prospect Park and the Brooklyn Museum. It holds more than 14,000 kinds of plants in specialty gardens such as the Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden, the rose garden and the Cherry Esplanade, along with a conservatory.

Carnegie Hall is a concert venue on Seventh Avenue at 57th Street in Midtown Manhattan, built by Andrew Carnegie to designs by William Burnet Tuthill and opened in 1891. Its brick and terracotta building holds three halls, the largest being the 2,790-seat Stern Auditorium, and hosts classical, jazz and other concerts.

Prospect Park is a 213-hectare park in Brooklyn laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux and opened in 1867. Its landscape includes the Long Meadow, a 36-hectare lawn, Brooklyn's only lake, wooded ravines, the Boathouse and the Prospect Park Zoo.

The Roosevelt Island Tramway is an aerial cable car that crosses the East River between East 60th Street and Second Avenue in Manhattan and Roosevelt Island. Opened in 1976 as a temporary link and rebuilt in 2010, its two red cabins travel about 960 metres beside the Queensboro Bridge, with views of the river and Midtown.

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.

Wollman Rink is an outdoor ice rink near the southeast corner of Central Park, Manhattan, with the skyline of Central Park South rising behind it. It opened in 1950, funded by Kate Wollman in memory of her family, and was rebuilt in the 1980s. Skating runs from late October to mid-March, with skate rental and lessons; pickleball courts take over in the warm months.

The Central Park Zoo is a 2.6-hectare zoo in the southeast corner of Central Park. A menagerie was kept here from 1864, and the present zoo opened in 1934; it was rebuilt with naturalistic habitats and reopened in 1988 under the Wildlife Conservation Society. Its exhibits are grouped around a central sea lion pool, with a children's zoo to the north.

Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts is a complex of theatres and concert halls on the Upper West Side, built in the 1960s around a central plaza with a fountain. It is home to the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, New York City Ballet and the Juilliard School, and its plazas are open to everyone.

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.

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.

Central Park is an 843-acre (341 ha) landscaped park in the middle of Manhattan, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux after their Greensward Plan of 1858 and completed in 1876. Its meadows, lakes, woodland paths and bridges, the Ramble, the Reservoir and Bethesda Terrace lie between the Upper West Side and the Upper East Side.

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.