Fort Tryon Park and the Cloisters occupy the northern end of Manhattan, one of the great secret corners of the city. Fort Tryon Park rises on the highest ground in Manhattan, where in 1776 the revolutionary fort of the same name fell to a British assault in a battle that killed the American garrison to almost the last man. John D. Rockefeller Jr. bought this land in the early twentieth century, donated it to the city, and helped fund the construction of the Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum's medieval art branch, which was assembled from pieces of five actual French and Spanish medieval cloisters shipped here stone by stone.
The building opened in 1938. Inside, the Unicorn Tapestries, among the most beautiful textiles ever made, hang in a room that feels genuinely medieval. Rockefeller also bought the New Jersey Palisades across the Hudson to preserve the view from here.
Stand on the terrace and look west over the river to the cliffs and the broad Hudson; this view has changed very little in three hundred years.