Location | 1000 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, New York City |
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Coordinates | 40°46′46″N73°57′47″W / 40.7794°N 73.9631°W |
Director | Max Hollein |
Public transit access | Subway : at 86th Street at 77th Street Bus : M1, M2, M3, M4, M79, M86 SBS |
Website | Official website |
The Metropolitan Museum of Art | |
Built | 1880 |
Architect | Richard Morris Hunt; also Calvert Vaux; Jacob Wrey Mould |
Architectural style | Beaux-Arts |
NRHP reference No. | 86003556 |
NYSRHP No. | 06101.000338 |
NYCL No. | 0410, 0972 |
Significant dates | |
Added to NRHP | January 29, 1972 [1] |
Designated NHL | June 24, 1986 [2] |
Designated NYSRHP | June 23, 1980 [3] |
Designated NYCL | June 9, 1967 (exterior) [4] November 19, 1977 (interior) [5] |
The Met Fifth Avenue is the primary museum building for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The building is located at 1000 Fifth Avenue, along the Museum Mile on the eastern edge of Central Park in Manhattan's Upper East Side.
After negotiations with the City of New York in 1871, the Met was granted the land between the East Park Drive, Fifth Avenue, and the 79th and 85th Street transverse roads in Central Park. A red-brick and stone building was designed by American architect Calvert Vaux and his collaborator Jacob Wrey Mould. Vaux's ambitious building was not well received; the building was dubbed by critics as a "mausoleum", its High Victorian Gothic style was already considered dated prior to completion, and the president of the Met termed the project "a mistake". [6]
Within 20 years, a new architectural plan engulfing the Vaux building was already being executed. Since that time, many additions have been made, including the distinctive Beaux-Arts Fifth Avenue facade, Great Hall, and Grand Stairway. These were designed by architect and Met trustee Richard Morris Hunt, but completed by his son, Richard Howland Hunt in 1902 after his father's death. [7] The architectural sculpture on the facade is by Karl Bitter. [8]
The wings that completed the Fifth Avenue facade in the 1910s were designed by the firm of McKim, Mead & White. The modernistic glass sides and rear of the museum are the work of Roche-Dinkeloo. Kevin Roche was the architect for the master plan and expansion of the museum for over 40 years. He was responsible for designing all of its new wings and renovations including but not limited to the American Wing, Greek and Roman Court, and recently opened Islamic Wing. [9]
The Met measures almost 1⁄4-mile (400 m) long and with more than 2 million square feet (190,000 m2) of floor space, more than 20 times the size of the original 1880 building. [10] [11] The museum building is an accretion of over 20 structures, most of which are not visible from the exterior. The City of New York owns the museum building and contributes utilities, heat, and some of the cost of guardianship.
The building houses numerous galleries, including the Anna Wintour Costume Center and Astor Court, along with other spaces, including the Thomas J. Watson Library and the Robert Goldwater Library.
The Charles Engelhard Court of the American Wing features the facade of the Branch Bank of the United States, a Wall Street bank that was facing demolition in 1913. [12] [13]
The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden is located on the roof near the southwestern corner of the museum. The garden's café and bar is a popular museum spot during the mild-weathered months, especially on Friday and Saturday evenings when large crowds can lead to long lines at the elevators. The roof garden offers views of Central Park and the Manhattan skyline. [14] [15] The garden is the gift of philanthropists Iris and B. Gerald Cantor, founder and chairman of securities firm Cantor Fitzgerald. [16] The garden was opened to the public on August 1, 1987. [17]
Every summer since 1998 the roof garden has hosted a single-artist exhibition. [15] The artists have been: Ellsworth Kelly (1998), Magdalena Abakanowicz (1999), David Smith (2000), Joel Shapiro (2001), Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen (2002), Roy Lichtenstein (2003), Andy Goldsworthy (2004), Sol LeWitt (2005), Cai Guo-Qiang (2006), [18] Frank Stella (2007), Jeff Koons (2008), Roxy Paine (2009), Big Bambú by Doug and Mike Starn (2010), [19] We Come in Peace by Huma Bhabha (2018), [20] and Parapivot by Alicja Kwade. [21]
The roof garden has views of the Manhattan skyline from a vantage point high above Central Park. [22] The views have been described as "the best in Manhattan." [23] Art critics have been known to complain that the view "distracts" from the art on exhibition. [24] New York Times art critic Ken Johnson complains that the "breathtaking, panoramic views of Central Park and the Manhattan skyline" creates "an inhospitable site for sculpture" that "discourages careful, contemplative looking." [25] Writer Mindy Aloff describes the roof garden as "the loveliest airborne space I know of in New York." [26] The café and bar in this garden are considered romantic by many. [22] [27] [28]
The museum's main building was designated a city landmark by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1967, [4] and its interior was separately recognized by the Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1977. [5] The Met's main building was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1986, recognizing both its monumental architecture, and its importance as a cultural institution. [29]
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. In 2022 it welcomed 3,208,832 visitors, ranking it the third most visited U.S museum, and eighth on the list of most-visited art museums in the world. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 Fifth Avenue, along the Museum Mile on the eastern edge of Central Park on Manhattan's Upper East Side, is by area one of the world's largest art museums. The first portion of the approximately 2-million-square-foot (190,000 m2) building was built in 1880. A much smaller second location, The Cloisters at Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan, contains an extensive collection of art, architecture, and artifacts from medieval Europe.
Fifth Avenue is a major and prominent thoroughfare in the borough of Manhattan in New York City, New York, United States. It stretches north from Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village to West 143rd Street in Harlem. It is one of the most expensive shopping streets in the world.
Fort Tryon Park is a public park located in the Washington Heights and Inwood neighborhoods of the borough of Manhattan in New York City. The 67-acre (27 ha) park is situated on a ridge in Upper Manhattan, close to the Hudson River to the west. It extends mostly from 192nd Street in the south to Riverside Drive in the north, and from Broadway in the east to the Henry Hudson Parkway in the west. The main entrance to the park is at Margaret Corbin Circle, at the intersection of Fort Washington Avenue and Cabrini Boulevard.
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Central Synagogue is a notable Reform synagogue located at 652 Lexington Avenue, at the corner of East 55th Street in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. It was built in 1870–1872 and was designed by Henry Fernbach in the Moorish Revival style as a copy of Budapest's Dohány Street Synagogue. It has been in continuous use by a congregation longer than any other in the state of New York, except Congregation Berith Sholom in Troy, New York, and is among the oldest existing synagogue buildings in the United States.
The New York Life Building is the headquarters of the New York Life Insurance Company at 51 Madison Avenue in the Rose Hill and NoMad neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. The building, designed by Cass Gilbert, abuts Madison Square Park and occupies an entire city block bounded by Madison Avenue, Park Avenue South, and 26th and 27th Streets.
The Harry F. Sinclair House is a mansion at the southeast corner of East 79th Street and Fifth Avenue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City. The house was built between 1897 and 1899. Over the first half of the 20th century, the house was successively the residence of businessmen Isaac D. Fletcher and Harry F. Sinclair, and then the descendants of Peter Stuyvesant, the last Director of New Netherland. The Ukrainian Institute of America acquired the home in 1955. After the house gradually fell into disrepair, the institute renovated the building in the 1990s. The house was added to the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) and was named a National Historic Landmark in 1978.
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Janice H. Levin (1913–2001) was an American businesswoman and philanthropist and art collector from New York City. She was a patron of the ballet and collected mostly French impressionist paintings. She was a supporter of higher education as well as charities in Israel. She donated many of her paintings to museums.
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External video | |
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"An Edifice for Art: The Architecture of the Met" on YouTube, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2020 |