Two million objects across five thousand years, in a building you cannot see in a day. Pick three departments and accept that you are missing the rest.
The scale problem
The Met holds around two million objects and shows a fraction of them across roughly two million square feet on Fifth Avenue. Trying to see all of it is not ambitious, it is a category error. People who attempt the whole thing spend six hours walking and remember almost nothing.
The approach that works: pick two or three departments, do them properly, sit down in between, and leave. Come back another day if you can. New Yorkers with membership drop in for forty minutes at a time, which is how the building is best used.
The departments worth choosing between
Egyptian Art, on the ground floor to the right of the entrance, runs chronologically through about forty rooms and ends at the Temple of Dendur — an entire sandstone temple from 15 BC, given by Egypt after the Aswan Dam flooded its original site, reassembled in a glass-walled hall with a reflecting pool and Central Park behind it. It is the single most impressive room in the museum and it is free of the crowd density of the painting galleries.
European Paintings, upstairs, is where the Vermeers, the Rembrandts, the Bruegel harvest scene and the Caravaggio are. Five of the roughly thirty-five surviving Vermeers are here, which is more than anywhere outside the Netherlands.
The American Wing has the Tiffany glass, the Frank Lloyd Wright room, and Emanuel Leutze’s enormous Washington Crossing the Delaware, which is much larger and much stranger than reproductions suggest.
Arms and Armour is the one children reliably like — a hall of mounted knights in full plate, and it is on the way to several other things.
Greek and Roman Art occupies a magnificent skylit court that also works as the best place in the building to sit down.
The Costume Institute in the basement is the Met Gala’s department and runs one big show a year.
The roof
The Cantor Roof Garden is open from spring to autumn and has a bar, a commissioned sculpture installation each season, and a view across the treetops of Central Park to the Midtown skyline. It closes in winter. Go at the end of your visit, not the start.
Tickets
Admission is by ticket at the door or online. Residents of New York State and students from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut can pay what they wish, with proof — this is a genuine pay-what-you-wish, not a suggested donation with a minimum, and the staff do not push back. Everyone else pays the posted rate.
The ticket is good for the same day at the main building and at The Met Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park, a reassembled medieval monastery overlooking the Hudson that is the quietest great museum in the city.
Timing
Weekday mornings at opening are the calmest. Friday and Saturday evenings the museum stays open late and the crowd thins considerably after about six. Avoid rainy weekend afternoons, when half of Manhattan has the same idea.
More Museums
Museum of Modern Art
Starry Night, the melting clocks, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and Warhol's soup cans, in six floors that can genuinely be done in three hours.
American Museum of Natural History
The blue whale, the dinosaurs and the dioramas, in a rambling complex of twenty-odd interconnected buildings on the west side of Central Park.
9/11 Memorial and Museum
Two voids where the towers stood, with the names of every person killed cut through the bronze parapets. The plaza is free. The museum below is not, and it is very hard.