Metropolitan Museum of Art

Walk into the Metropolitan and you can cross the ancient world, medieval Europe, imperial China and modern New York in a single afternoon. One wing holds an entire Egyptian temple, the Temple of Dendur, given by Egypt in the 1960s and rebuilt stone by stone behind a glass wall facing Central Park. Beyond it run galleries of European painting, a hall of arms and armor, a collection of historical dress, and an American Wing built around the marble facade of a demolished Wall Street bank. The Met was meant to hold the whole world, and it now keeps close to two million objects.

It had to build that from nothing. When a group of Americans incorporated the museum in 1870, the young United States had no royal or imperial hoard to inherit the way the Louvre or the Prado had. The founders, the lawyer John Jay among them, set out to assemble an encyclopedia of human art for a country that owned none. Its first purchase was a single Roman sarcophagus, and the next year a block of 174 European paintings gave it a picture gallery overnight.

The city granted it land inside Central Park on one condition, that the doors stay open to the public. The columned Fifth Avenue front that visitors climb today was designed by Richard Morris Hunt and finished in 1902. Behind it the original red-brick building of 1880 still stands, hidden inside the later wings and visible now only from within the galleries.