The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the largest art museum in the Western Hemisphere. The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870 by a group of American businessmen and civic leaders who felt the United States needed a great public art museum comparable to the Louvre or the British Museum. It opened in its current Central Park location in 1880 in a small Victorian Gothic building, and has been expanding ever since, swallowing the park behind it in successive additions that now cover fourteen acres of floor space.
The collection contains more than two million works spanning five thousand years of human creativity, from Egyptian temple art to contemporary painting, and the museum holds one of the greatest collections of arms and armor in the world, along with its celebrated American Wing, its Greek and Roman galleries, and its rooftop garden with seasonal commissions. Admission is suggested, not required. Walk through the Great Hall past the flower arrangements and choose a direction.
A day is not enough; few people have seen the whole thing.