Museum Mile in New York – seven museums along Fifth Avenue, from the Frick to El Museo

Museum Mile in New York is the stretch of Fifth Avenue along Central Park where millionaires' mansions became museums. Within a few kilometres you'll find America's largest art museum, Frank Lloyd Wright's spiral, Klimt's golden portrait, and the country's oldest museum of Latin American art. Here's how to visit them in order.

Museum Mile in New York is the nickname for the stretch of Fifth Avenue that runs alongside Central Park between 82nd and 110th Streets. The stretch from 59th to 96th Street was once called Millionaires' Row for its many private palaces, and several of them now house museums. The walk below begins just south of the mile, at the Frick, and heads north – one day if you choose two or three museums, a week if you want to see everything.

01The Frick Collection – a home full of masters

The coal and steel magnate Henry Clay Frick bequeathed his art collection to the public, and after the death of his wife Adelaide in 1931 the architect John Russell Pope converted his Beaux-Arts mansion on Fifth Avenue into a museum. It opened on 16 December 1935. The collection comprises around 1,500 works of European art from the 14th to the 19th century, by painters such as Bellini, Holbein, Rembrandt, Titian, Velázquez, Vermeer, Goya and Turner. After an extensive renovation, the house reopened in April 2025. "I can make money… I cannot make pictures," Frick said of why he collected.

02The Metropolitan Museum of Art – America's largest

At 1000 Fifth Avenue stands the Met, founded in 1870 by a group of philanthropists, artists and businessmen who wanted to create a national institution. The first part of the building was completed in 1880. Measured by area, it is the world's fourth-largest museum and the largest art museum in America, and with 5,727,258 visitors in the 2025 financial year, the most visited museum in the USA.

The collection today numbers 1.5 million works, divided into 17 departments – from ancient Egypt and the Middle East via the European masters to American and modern art, with large collections of African, Asian, Oceanic and Islamic art, musical instruments, costumes and armour. Several complete interiors, from 1st-century Rome to modern American design, have been reconstructed in the galleries. Choose one or two departments per visit.

03Neue Galerie – Vienna and Berlin on 86th Street

In the William Starr Miller House, a Louis XIII and Beaux-Arts mansion on the corner of 86th Street, is the Neue Galerie, which opened in November 2001. The museum was created by Ronald S. Lauder as a tribute to the art dealer Serge Sabarsky and is devoted to German and Austrian art and design from the early 1900s. The second floor presents Vienna – Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele and the Wiener Werkstätte – and the third floor Germany, with Kandinsky, Klee, Kirchner and the Bauhaus. In 2006, Lauder bought Klimt's Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I for the museum; it has been on display here since July that year. In May 2026, it was announced that the museum will merge with the Met in 2028.

04The Guggenheim – Frank Lloyd Wright's spiral

Between 88th and 89th Streets, at 1071 Fifth Avenue, stands the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. It was founded in 1939 as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting under the direction of Hilla von Rebay, who had persuaded the mining heir Solomon R. Guggenheim to start collecting abstract art. Frank Lloyd Wright's building took fifteen years to design and build and was completed in 1959: a bowl-shaped gallery with a spiral ramp rising six storeys beneath a skylight. The building was controversial when it opened but was later widely acclaimed. The collection comprises around 8,000 works, from Impressionism to contemporary art, and is shared with the sister museums in Bilbao and Venice.

05Cooper Hewitt – design in Carnegie's mansion

Further north is the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, in Andrew Carnegie's former mansion. The museum was founded by three granddaughters of the businessman Peter Cooper, the Hewitt sisters, who were inspired by the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and opened a museum of decorative art at Cooper Union in 1897. Today it is one of the Smithsonian's nineteen museums, with collections of furniture, textiles, wallpaper, ceramics, jewellery and drawings.

06The Jewish Museum – in the Warburg mansion

At 1109 Fifth Avenue stands the Jewish Museum, in the Felix M. Warburg House, designed by C. P. H. Gilbert in château style. Frieda Warburg donated the house in 1944, and the museum opened to the public in 1947. The collection of around 30,000 objects – religious artefacts, art and media – is one of the world's largest on Jewish culture. The museum has also made art history: it held the first museum retrospective of Robert Rauschenberg in 1963, and the 1966 exhibition Primary Structures, which launched minimalism. Admission is free on Saturdays.

07El Museo del Barrio – the northern end of the mile

At 1230 Fifth Avenue, at the northern end of the mile, is El Museo del Barrio, founded in 1969 by parents, teachers and activists in East Harlem together with the artist Rafael Montañez Ortíz. It is the oldest museum of Latin American art in the USA and has more than 6,500 works spanning 800 years – from pre-Columbian Taíno objects to contemporary Puerto Rican and Latin American art.

More about the city can be found in VERA PI's guide to New York City and on the city map. More destinations can be found among Metro Mode's destinations, and across the park, our perfect day on the Upper West Side.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.