How do you see the Met in a single day?

A museum too large for one day

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, known simply as the Met, stands at 1000 Fifth Avenue on the eastern edge of Central Park, on the stretch of Fifth Avenue known as Museum Mile. By floor area it ranks as the third largest museum in the world and the largest art museum in the Americas, and it draws more visitors each year than any other museum in the United States. The building runs almost a quarter of a mile long.

It is an encyclopedic museum, built to cover the art of the whole world across the whole of history, from the ancient Near East and Egypt through Greece and Rome to the present day. Its collection lists some one and a half million works, divided among seventeen curatorial departments, housed in more than two million square feet of floor space, more than twenty times the size of the museum's first building.

No visitor sees all of it in a single day, and trying to is the surest way to leave exhausted and remember little. The better approach is to choose a handful of departments in advance, walk to them directly, and treat the rest of the building as something to return to on another visit.

How the museum grew

The Met was founded in 1870 by a group of philanthropists, artists and businessmen who wanted a national institution to inspire and educate the public. It opened on February 20, 1872, in a building at 681 Fifth Avenue, well south of its present site, and the collection soon outgrew those rooms.

In 1880 the museum moved into its first building inside Central Park, a red brick and stone hall designed by Calvert Vaux, one of the two designers of the park itself, working with his collaborator Jacob Wrey Mould. That early building still stands, but it has long since been enclosed within later additions.

The grand Fifth Avenue facade, the Great Hall and the Grand Stairway were added in the late eighteen-nineties and early nineteen-hundreds, designed in the Beaux-Arts style by Richard Morris Hunt and his son Richard Howland Hunt. The modern glass sides and rear, facing the park, are the work of the firm Roche-Dinkeloo. The museum's first accessioned object, a Roman sarcophagus, remains on display.

Plan your path before you arrive

Because the building is so large, pick two or three departments before setting out and walk to them first; wandering at random can use up a whole day without reaching any one gallery in depth. Decide whether paintings, Egypt, or the Greek and Roman galleries matter most, and let that decision shape the order of the visit.

Admission works differently depending on where a visitor lives: those from outside New York State pay a fixed admission, while New York State residents and students from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut pay what they wish. Tickets can be bought online in advance, which allows a visitor to walk straight to a gallery entrance rather than queuing, though advance tickets are not required.

For guidance on which sights are worth reserving ahead and which are not, see booking ahead. Every Met ticket also includes same-day entry to the museum's second site, the Cloisters, in Fort Tryon Park; its hours and days change, so check the museum's own site before building a day around both.

The Great Hall and a choice of directions

Climb the broad steps from Fifth Avenue into the Great Hall, the museum's grand entrance, and the day's first decision presents itself. Straight ahead, the Grand Stairway rises to the second floor and the European paintings. To the right lies Egypt; to the left, Greece and Rome. Few visitors manage more than two of these three in a single day.

Turning right leads into the Egyptian wing, forty galleries holding almost all of the museum's more than twenty-six thousand pieces of Egyptian art, nearly half excavated by the museum itself between 1906 and 1941. The wing ends at the Temple of Dendur, a complete temple standing beside a reflecting pool in a vast room lit by windows onto the park, one of the most extraordinary rooms in the city.

Turning left leads to the Greek and Roman galleries, expanded in 2007 to roughly sixty thousand square feet so that most of a collection of more than seventeen thousand objects can be shown. Among them is a complete bedroom from a Roman villa at Boscoreale, buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in the year 79.

Choosing between Egypt and the Greek and Roman galleries, rather than trying to cover both thoroughly, is often the difference between a satisfying day and a rushed one. Each wing rewards an unhurried hour or more of walking; moving quickly through either turns a temple beside a reflecting pool, or a buried Roman villa, into no more than a corridor passed on the way to somewhere else.

Upstairs: the paintings

At the top of the Grand Stairway hang more than two thousand five hundred European paintings, spanning the thirteenth century through the early twentieth, arranged across the Old Masters galleries reinstalled in 2023 and the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century galleries that follow them on the same floor.

The museum ranks its holding of French painting second only to the museums of Paris, with Courbet, Degas, Manet, Monet, Cézanne and Van Gogh represented in depth. A visitor with limited time who cares most about painting should go directly to the Grand Stairway rather than detouring through the ground floor first.

These galleries alone can absorb an entire morning or afternoon, since the rooms run in sequence rather than as a single open hall, and backtracking to compare two paintings can cost real time. Visitors planning to pair painting with either Egypt or the Greek and Roman wing should expect to move briskly through whichever comes second.

The rest of the house, and getting there

Beyond the stairs are rooms unlikely to fit into a single day but worth knowing about for a return visit: the Arms and Armor galleries, among the most popular in the museum; the Astor Court, a complete Ming-dynasty Chinese garden court opened in 1981, the first built outside China; and the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, with arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, including memorial poles carved by the Asmat people of New Guinea.

There are also dozens of furnished period rooms moved whole into the galleries, from first-century Rome to modern American design; about five thousand musical instruments from around the world; the Costume Institute, known for the Met Gala; and the Gerald Cantor Roof Garden near the southwest corner of the roof, looking out over the trees of Central Park. Galleries close in turn for renovation, so check the museum's list of closed galleries before setting out.

The museum sits on Fifth Avenue between the subway lines on Lexington Avenue to the east and those under Central Park West to the west; walking across the park from the west side is one of the pleasures of a visit. Step-free entrances are at 81st Street and Fifth Avenue and through the garage at 80th Street, and getting around covers the subway lines nearby.

The museum offers free tours and a free digital guide through the Bloomberg Connects app. Just behind the building, inside the park, stands Cleopatra's Needle, and walking north along Museum Mile leads to the Guggenheim. Either makes a good coda to a day that has already given as much as one visitor can reasonably absorb.