New York (city)

A

Museums

New York’s 250 museums cater to every specialty and every taste. It has museums in such fields as natural history, broadcasting, fire-fighting, crafts, and ethnic cultures. As the world’s greatest art center, New York City has more than 400 galleries and is a mecca for artists, art dealers, and collectors. Madison Avenue between 57th and 86th Streets is the most important locale for galleries, but dozens of others are located in SoHo (south of Houston Street) and adjoining neighborhoods.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, founded in 1870 and located in Central Park, contains nearly 3 million objects in every known artistic medium, representing cultures from every part of the world, from ancient times to the present. Its permanent collections are so vast that its 300 galleries and 32 acres of floor space can display only one-fifth of the museum’s total holdings at any one time. It is the third largest art museum in the world, after the British Museum in London, England, and the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The Cloisters, a branch of the Metropolitan Museum, specializes in medieval art and is located in Fort Tryon Park in northern Manhattan.

New York’s special role in the history of contemporary culture is in part a reflection of the importance of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), which is the greatest repository of 20th-century art in the world. Founded in 1929, MOMA concentrates on artists born after 1880 and has strong collections of French impressionists, modern sculpture, photography, and film. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue is as well known for its architecture as for its contents. Founded by a wealthy copper magnate, it was designed by U.S. architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Because of its unusual combination of oblong forms and its prominent spiral gallery, the building has been called everything from a “giant snail to the most beautiful building in New York.”

The Whitney Museum of American Art, at 75th Street and Madison Avenue, is the only major museum in New York exclusively devoted to 20th-century American art. Designed in the shape of an inverted pyramid by Hungarian-American architect Marcel Breuer, the building of rich gray granite is itself a piece of modern art. The Frick Collection, at 70th Street and Fifth Avenue, is the former home of steel magnate Henry Clay Frick. The 40-room mansion resembles a French chateau and the art collection includes works by 16th-century Venetian painter Titian and 17th-century Dutch painters Rembrandt van Rijn and Jan Vermeer.

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The American Museum of Natural History, on Central Park West between 77th and 81st streets, is the largest museum in the world devoted to the natural sciences. Founded in 1869, it has outstanding collections dealing with Native Americans, Inuits (Eskimos), dinosaurs, reptiles, and birds. Its popular Hayden Planetarium was being expanded and renovated in the late 1990s.

The Brooklyn Museum contains one of North America’s top collections of pre-Columbian, Egyptian, Near Eastern, and Asian art, as well as the finest collection of Russian garments and textiles outside Russia. New York’s other unusual museums include the New York Historical Society, which has an outstanding research library; the Lower East Side Tenement House Museum, the only institution in America devoted to recreating the ghetto experience of impoverished immigrants; the South Street Seaport Museum, which celebrates a port which ranked for a century as the busiest in the world; and the Federal Hall National Memorial, located on the spot where George Washington took the oath of office as the first president of the United States.

B

Performing Arts

New York has long been the music and dance capital of the world and is the home of the largest number of professional musicians and dancers anywhere. Moreover, its theaters dominate the stage in the United States, and their attendance, revenue, and range of offerings are rivaled only by theaters in London.

Built in 1891 by U.S. industrialist Andrew Carnegie for the Oratorio Society, Carnegie Hall is neither exceptionally large nor architecturally distinguished. But it remains the pre-eminent concert hall in the United States. Carnegie Hall’s superb acoustics have delighted performers since Russian composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky was the guest conductor during opening week. Extensive renovations on the hall were completed in 1986.

Located on Broadway at about 66th Street, Lincoln Center is the largest performing arts center in the world. Construction on the project began in 1959. Avery Fisher Hall was the first structure in Lincoln Center to be completed. The hall is also the home of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and offers performances by other soloists and orchestras throughout the year. The center’s largest building, Metropolitan Opera House, is the centerpiece of the entire complex. Completed in 1966, it presents lavish operatic productions with international casts and also serves as home to the American Ballet Theatre. Finally, the New York State Theater is the home of two institutions-the New York City Ballet and the New York City Opera, which alternate their seasons. Also in Lincoln Center is the Juilliard School, which is widely regarded as the most distinguished musical institution in the nation.

The Brooklyn Academy of Music, just across the East River from Manhattan, emphasizes new repertory and is one of the oldest performing arts centers in the United States. The present building was completed in 1908. It includes the Opera House and the BAM Rose Cinemas, a four-cinema motion-picture complex that features first-run independent and foreign films.

C

Cultural Events

Scarcely a week passes in New York without the observance of a special religious, ethnic, or national holiday. The many dozens of parades which annually move down the streets include the Chinese New Year Parade in February, the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in March, the Easter Day Parade in April, the Puerto Rican Day Parade in June, the Lesbian and Gay Pride Day Parade in June, the African-American Day Parade in September, the Columbus Day Parade in October, the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade in October, and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade in November.

A number of cultural events celebrate the arts. The New York Film Festival, held in September, showcases U.S. and international films, emphasizing artistic merit rather than marketability. Since the 1950s, Central Park has hosted Shakespeare in the Park, a series of open-air, summer evening productions of plays by English dramatist William Shakespeare.

D

Colleges and Universities

Columbia University is the oldest, wealthiest, and most famous of New York’s institutions of higher education. It is situated primarily on a campus of 15 hectares (36 acres) in the Morningside Heights section of Manhattan. Founded as Kings College under a charter from George II of Britain in 1754, it has since grown into a multipurpose university with 25,000 students. Columbia University includes an Ivy-League undergraduate college, and distinguished professional schools of architecture, business, dentistry, journalism, law, medicine, public health, and social work.

The metropolitan region includes more than 100 other colleges and universities. Leading educational institutions include New York University, the nation’s largest private university; Rockefeller University, a well-known research institution in the biological sciences; Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, a private, tuition-free college specializing in engineering and architecture; and Pratt Institute, a private college in Brooklyn with excellent programs in art and architecture. Important Catholic institutions include Fordham University, Manhattan College, St. John’s University, and the College of Mount Saint Vincent. Yeshiva University is the nation’s first major college expressly for the education of Orthodox Jews.

The city also provides public education at the university level with the City University of New York, the largest municipal institution in the country. With the introduction in 1970 of open admission, any high-school graduate who resided in the city became eligible to enter either one of the university's ten four-year colleges or one of its seven two-year colleges, depending on grades. In 1974 nearly 250,000 students were enrolled in the system. For more than a century, no tuition was charged for undergraduate students who were city residents. In 1976, when the city approached bankruptcy due to economic problems, tuition was imposed. By 1994 registration had fallen to about 188,000, but CUNY remains the largest urban educational institution in the United States.

Superior facilities for medical training exist at the New York University-Bellevue Medical Center, the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, Mount Sinai Medical Center, and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University. Columbia, Fordham, and New York University have distinguished law schools. The Institute of Fine Arts of New York University and the Juilliard School-which has programs in music, dance, and drama-give outstanding instruction in their specialties. There are also many fine programs in the city in law, business, journalism, architecture, social work, and planning.

V

Parks and Recreation

Although New York is the most populous and densely settled of all American cities, more than 1,000 individual parks with more than 37,000 acres of parkland are available to the public. The creation of Central Park between 1857 and 1875 affected the development of public open space throughout the United States. Almost all subsequent U.S. park designers imitated some or all of the features found in Central Park. American landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux designed the 341-hectare (843-acre) park, located in the center of Manhattan. It has numerous playgrounds, a children's zoo, 8 km (5 mi) of bridle paths, bicycling and jogging lanes, a large reservoir, a sailboat pond, two ice-skating rinks, tennis courts, baseball diamonds, a swimming pool, and a lake for row-boating. On summer evenings, there are free band concerts, free dances, and free nightly performances of plays in the Delacorte Theatre, an amphitheater that seats 2,300. Of the park's many monuments the most famous is the 3,500-year-old Egyptian obelisk, known as Cleopatra's Needle.

Two of the largest parks, Pelham Bay Park, with 862 hectares (2,130 acres), and Van Cortlandt Park, with 464 hectares (1,146 acres), are in the Bronx. The Bronx also has New York's largest zoo and largest botanical garden, both located in the 292-hectare (721-acre) Bronx Park. The largest park in Queens is Flushing Meadows-Corona, with 509 hectares (1,257 acres). It was the site of two world's fairs. Brooklyn's Prospect Park and Botanic Garden are two favorite retreats in that borough. Beaches fringe many of the city's parks and recreation areas, such as those in Pelham Bay, Rockaway, Coney Island, and South Beach.

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