Brooklyn Museum

The Brooklyn Museum was meant to be the largest art museum in the world. The Beaux-Arts building that the firm McKim, Mead & White designed at the turn of the 20th century was only ever about a quarter built, and even so it is vast, a temple of a place at the edge of Prospect Park.

Inside is one of the finest Egyptian collections in the United States, thousands of years of statues, coffins and papyri, much of it gathered by the museum's own early expeditions. On the fourth floor is something that changed how museums think about who belongs on their walls: Judy Chicago's "The Dinner Party," a huge triangular banquet table set for thirty-nine women from history, given a permanent home here in 2007 at the heart of a center for feminist art. The museum's American galleries run alongside it, from colonial portraits through Hudson River landscapes to Georgia O'Keeffe.