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All the best secrets of the Metropolitan Museum of Art brought to you by Museum Hack

When you think “Metropolitan Museum of Art” you probably think about Central Park, 5th Avenue shopping and Upper East Side ladies wearing fur and eating finger sandwiches, right? Yeah. Wrong! The Met was started by Finance Bros who wanted to show up the French (specifically, the Louvre.) They decided that New York City needed an encyclopedic museum to “culture the masses.” When they first started the place, it was stationed in a townhouse on the corner of 53rd and 5th. Today, it's the home of a Tommy Hilfiger and once they outgrew that, the museum moved down to 14th St, in what is today the big Salvation Army. When it moved to Central Park in 1880, there weren't even paved roads. You had to go into the park in order to get into the museum. Why? The Upper East Side of the 1880s was essentially the Wild West, and the city thought that having a museum up there would help people move uptown. In fact, the first day they opened the Met on the weekends, their major issue was that they didn’t have enough spittoons for the patrons. The Met is meant to be a museum for the people, so OWN IT. Though, no more spitting in galleries.

Next time you are waiting in line to get your museum admission, check out the flowers in the Great Hall. They are endowed by Lila Acheson Wallace, the heir to the Reader's Digest fortune. They are replaced weekly and are always seasonally appopriate. For example, during Halloween, they usually put a pumpkin in the middle. How would you know this? There is the tiniest of plaques under the major flower pots. Look close. One guy has been replacing these flowers for years - most of the arrangements are between 10-12 feet. He also does flowers for MoMA. But we don’t talk about that. 

Scary line out the front doors and up the stairs? Never fear - there is another entrance that you should know about at 81st and 5th. We call it the “Education Entrance,” because it’s where school groups usually go in. While it doesn’t have the grandeur of the Great Hall, the coat check and admission lines are ALWAYS shorter, there are pre-admission bathrooms (!) and the gift shop has all the same stuff as the big one upstairs.

That Met facade, huh? It’s so pretty. So iconic. So neoclassical. And so… unfinished? Look wayyy up at the top. See those lumpy pyramids? Apparently, architect Richard Morris Hunt wanted 31 statues carved onto the facade, but he died before he fully explained himself. Then his son suggested that they should be carved to represent Music, Architecture, Painting, and Sculpture. Which is nice and all, but why didn’t they get finished? Money. The Met ran out of money. In 1902, they decided to move on to other things, and never went back to clean up the lumps. Now the building is landmarked, which means altering the exterior is sorta a big no-no. Oops.

The best bathrooms are on the second floor, north side, Asian Art. To be avoided? The ones in the hallway heading towards the Temple of Dendur. There is always a line, and they usually smell. If you want to be sneaky, there are restrooms just south of the Medieval Hall, just before the entrance to Petrie Court European Sculpture Gallery. There is also a drinking fountain.

Written by Ethan Angelica of Museum Hack

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Here is what Wikipedia says about Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, colloquially referred to as the Met, is an art museum in New York City. It is the largest art museum in the Americas and fourth-largest in the world.

In 2022, the museum welcomed 3,208,832 visitors, making it the third-most visited museum in the United States and the eighth-most visited art museum in the world. In 2000, its permanent collection was said to have over two million works; it currently lists a total of 1.5 million objects. The collection is divided into 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 Fifth Avenue, along the Museum Mile on the eastern edge of Central Park on Manhattan's Upper East Side, is by area one of the world's largest art museums. The first portion of the approximately 2-million-square-foot (190,000 m2) building was built in 1880. A much smaller second location, The Cloisters at Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan, contains an extensive collection of art, architecture, and artifacts from medieval Europe.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870 with its mission to bring art and art education to the American people. The museum's permanent collection consists of works of art ranging from the ancient Near East and ancient Egypt, through classical antiquity to the contemporary world. It includes paintings, sculptures, and graphic works from many European Old Masters, as well as an extensive collection of American, modern, and contemporary art. The Met also maintains extensive holdings of African, Asian, Oceanian, Byzantine, and Islamic art. The museum is home to encyclopedic collections of musical instruments, costumes, and decorative arts and textiles, as well as antique weapons and armor from around the world. Several notable interiors, ranging from 1st-century Rome through modern American design, are installed in its galleries.


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Comments (9)

Hoa Dao

I can't wait to visit here some day!

Humphrey

The Met is such a great example of community engagement, I love their educational programs.

Jamie Bevington

Metropolitan museum of the art has the best example of art and design

Fathima627

We expected our first visit to be way faster, spent so much time in the Egyptian rooms.

Eva975

It would be nice to visit. I think I will learn lots of interesting things I could share with my colleagues.

dig this

The collection really extends to all corners of the world, great for whether you reside in USA, Canada, Europe , Germany, Australia, New Zealand , UAE or any other country.

MonicaSavage

The Met is the greatest contribution America could ever give.

Kate Cat

I could spend all of eternity in the Met!

soundergrapes

The workdays can be quite tough, mainly due to study, a lot of homework, but I have ordinary days when I can head to the museum and just walk through it's halls. Love it!