Metropolitan Museum of Art

About this property

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. The steel structure of the building was designed by London-born architects Edward C. and George K. Radford. Mould described Edward Radford as “an engineer of high scientific attainments to whom we entrusted the constructive portions of the iron work [i. e. the steel structure] of the building”. 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". 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. The architectural sculpture on the facade is by Karl Bitter. 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. In 2024, initial building plans were released for a half a billion dollar architectural expansion to the SW corner of the MET Museum; the expansion was announced as being planned for completion by 2030. In 2026, the Condé M. Nast Galleries opened at the Met Fifth Avenue. 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. 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.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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