Explore New York

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Cathedral of St. John the Divine is the cathedral of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, on Amsterdam Avenue in Morningside Heights. Begun in 1892 in a Romanesque and Byzantine style and continued in Gothic Revival after 1909, it remains unfinished. The nave, completed in 1941, is 183 metres long; the church was restored after a fire in 2001.