The American Museum of Natural History is one of the world's preeminent scientific and cultural institutions. Since its founding in 1869, the Museum has advanced its global mission to discover, interpret and disseminate information about human cultures, the natural world and the universe through a wide-ranging program of scientific research, education and exhibition.

The Museum is renowned for its exhibitions and scientific collections, which serve as a field guide to the entire planet and present a panorama of the world's cultures.

Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution is the only museum in the nation devoted exclusively to historic and contemporary design. The Museum presents compelling perspectives on the impact of design on daily life through active educational and curatorial programming. It is the mission of Cooper-Hewitt’s staff and Board of Trustees to advance the public understanding of design across the twenty-four centuries of human creativity represented by the Museum’s collection.

The Museum was founded in 1897 by Amy, Eleanor, and Sarah Hewitt

Roughly 12 million immigrants passed through this island as they entered America from the late 1800s through the mid-1950s, sometimes at the rate of thousands a day. Their reception was not always welcoming, and their stories of hope and struggle are re-created today in the restored hall and museum. Walking through the Baggage Room and up to the Registry Room, visitors experience the path just as the immigrants did, tracing their fates through photographs, artifacts, and oral histories. Outside, the American Immigrant Wall of Honor is a testament to about 600,000 of those new Americans. Anyone who wants to research his or her ancestors can start a search at the American Family Immigration History Center, or on the island's website. This is history in a very palatable medium—trust us, you'll like it.

A real find among the city's museums, this collection housed in an exquisite Beaux Arts mansion on the Upper East Side represents the personal holdings of Henry Clay Frick. The 19th-century industrialist had excellent taste: Among the exhibits are rare collections of Limoges enamels, Chinese porcelains, French 18th-century furniture, and a who's who of painters from Rembrandt to Gainsborough to Vermeer

Among the highlights: a European painting gallery packed with masterpieces (Rembrandt, Giotto, Caravaggio, Raphael, Goya, El Greco, Turner, Vermeer, Degas, Renoir, and C�zanne are all represented); a trove of Egyptian art and artifacts, including the showstopping reconstructed Temple of Dendur; an impressive selection of Greek and Roman statuary; American paintings and sculpture from colonial times through the present day; and prehistoric artifacts from all over the globe. Our suggestion is to pick two or three small sections you'd like to see, and then return another day for a few more. Or browse some of the less-appreciated and less crowded�but no less stunning�collections, such as the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, or the smallish but exquisite galleries of Modern Art.

Worth visiting for its architecture alone, the 1906 personal library of Pierpont Morgan, the late 19th-century industrialist, was designed by Charles McKim of McKim, Mead and White. It's clear that no expense was spared—beneath an ornately painted ceiling, literary types will marvel at three tiers stacked with texts, as well as Thoreau's Walden Pond journal and preliminary sketches from the children's book Babar. Music lovers can peruse original manuscripts by Beethoven. A gallery upstairs in the Renzo Piano addition—an airy glass-and-steel structure completed in 2006 that unites three historic buildings—houses more adventurous special exhibits, compared with the somewhat staid permanent collection. A 2006 show focused on Bob Dylan memorabilia and other folk-music artifacts.

Founded in 1929 by Lillie P. Bliss, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Mary Quinn Sullivan, and four other founding Trustees, The Museum of Modern Art was the first museum devoted to the modern era. Beginning with the innovative European art of the 1880s, the collection contains unparalleled holdings in every ensuing period of visual culture up to the present day, including such distinctly modern forms as film and industrial design in addition to more traditional mediums. Now numbering some 150,000 objects, the collection offers an unparalleled overview of modern and contemporary art.
The museum reopened in November 2004 on its original site in a new building designed by architect Yoshio Taniguchi. The new structure extensively expanded gallery space and added a soaring light-filled atrium 110 feet high. The walls themselves were designed to seem as if they float in space, reinforcing the idea that the building itself is an attraction.
The masterpieces in the permanent collection are too numerous to mention—among them Van Gogh's The Starry Night, Dalí­'s The Persistence of Memory, Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon—and the collections of contemporary architecture, design, and photography could fill museums of their own.

Between the Met and the Guggenheim sits the Neue Galerie, the most recent (2001) addition to Museum Mile. A former home of society grande dame Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt III, it displays a modest but focused collection of early 20th-century Austrian and German art and design—Egon Schiele's disconcerting studies of male-female relationships; Gustav Klimt's dazzling first portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, with its luminous patchwork of gold and silver; an elegantly simple table fan by Josef Hoffman.

The unique spiral building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright—reluctantly, since he thought New York was too overbuilt—tends to overshadow the collections within. Designed as a reverse version of a Babylonian temple, the Guggenheim completely changed museum-going, sending visitors to the top floor first and then allowing them to wind their way down along a corkscrew ramp. What they see as they go are special exhibitions, like the 2008 installation by Cai Guo-Qiang that saw cars suspended from the central atrium—an exhibition described by Guggenheim director Thomas Krens as one of the "best artistic transformations of the Frank Lloyd Wright space we've ever seen." There are also rooms devoted to selections from the Guggenheim Foundation's eclectic collection, including sculptures by Brancusi and Arp and paintings by Picasso, Pissarro, de Kooning, Klee, and Jeff Koons. There are frequent traveling exhibitions, and since the museum has outposts in other cities such as Bilbao and Venice, pieces may circulate from other locations.

A branch of the Met museum devoted to the art and architecture of medieval Europe, the Cloisters is a series of medieval passageways reconstructed from French monasteries and incorporated within a modern museum.

Situated in Fort Tyron Park at the northern tip of Manhattan above 189th Street, the museum exists largely thanks to a generous endowment from John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who helped the Met purchase not only the collection but the new building and 700 acres of land in New Jersey, which preserves the bucolic views across the Hudson.

The collection includes tapestries, stained-glass windows, illuminated manuscripts, and sculpture, mainly from the Romanesque and Gothic periods.

The Cloisters is a popular destination on sweltering summer days, when strolling the cool, calm passageways and gardens is a heavenly respite from the urban madness.

Towering over the Bowery like a beacon of all things shiny and forward-thinking, the New Museum is one of the city's most talked-about landmarks. Designed by Tokyo-based architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa in conjunction with Gensler New York, the building consists of six rectangular boxes covered in aluminum mesh and stacked precariously on top of one another like some giant children's toy. If the art doesn't always live up to the lofty exterior (the rotating contemporary exhibitions can be uneven), the great bookstore and panoramic roof terrace (open only on weekends) make it worth the visit, as do the ongoing "Night School" public seminars encompassing everything from 1970s seminal film screenings to performances from rockers such as Andrew WK.