★★★★★ 5.0
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Brooklyn Museum
The columns holding up this Beaux-Arts facade actually don't hold up anything at all. These decorative Doric and Corinthian beauties are embedded into the walls like architectural jewelry, unlike their structural Greek ancestors. McKim, Mead & White's 1897 masterpiece sits on a surprising foundation - when construction began September 14, 1895, engineers found bedrock hundreds of feet down, so this entire 560,000-square-foot giant rests on gravel fill. What started in 1823 as Brooklyn's first free library for apprentices became New York's second-largest museum. Step through those limestone doors into history-making spaces - in 1923, this became America's first museum to display African metalwork as fine art, not artifacts. The Beaux-Arts Court ahead showcases European masterpieces in rooms that look Roman but think distinctly French.
Did You Know?
- Founded in 1823 as the Brooklyn Apprentices’ Library—the first free library in New York City—the Brooklyn Museum began as an educational initiative for local youth and tradesmen; a teenage Walt Whitman once served as its librarian, highlighting its deep roots in Brooklyn’s cultural and literary history.
- The museum’s grand Beaux-Arts building, designed by the renowned architectural firm McKim, Mead & White (creators of the original Penn Station), was originally intended to be the largest museum in the world—even bigger than the Louvre—but financial constraints scaled back the ambitious plans, leaving the current structure as only a quarter of the envisioned size.
- Home to the only dedicated Center for Feminist Art in a major U.S. museum, the Brooklyn Museum has long been a pioneer in highlighting underrepresented voices; it was also one of the first museums in the country to host major exhibitions of African and international modern art in the 1920s, and its ‘Mummy Chamber’ is one of the most celebrated ancient Egyptian collections outside of Egypt, fascinating visitors of all ages.