By Richard Magat

Sep. 9, 2015:  Looking outside my window, I see the standard lampposts, with street names and names of cross streets, but there is one addition--the words "Museum Mile."

The array, on Fifth Avenue between the Metropolitan Museum of Art at East 82nd Street and (until recently when it was extended to 110th Street to include the new Africa Center) East 105th Street, traditionally began with El Museo del Barrio, between East 104th and 105th Streets, which celebrates the work of Puerto Rican and Latin American artists and has an important collection of carved and wooden figures of saints.

The crowning repository is the Metropolitan Museum of Art, between East 80th and 84th Streets, which houses more than two million objects. A few blocks north stands the architectural wonder that is Frank Lloyd Wright's circular Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Not all of Manhattan's notable museums are on Museum Mile. Prominent are the American Museum of Natural History, across Central Park, the Frick Collection, the Museum of Arts and Design, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, the Museum of the Moving Image, and the National Lighthouse Museum.

There are two museums named "new," The New Museum in the Bowery and the Neue Galerie on Museum Mile. The New Museum features avant-garde works such as Freedom, a "SWAT Team of Teletubbies that stand guard in a Zuccotti-like plaza," as described in the New Yorker. The Neue Galerie, housed in an ornate mansion at East 86th Street, just closed an exhibition by the Austrian painter Gustav Klimt, one of whose major works, The Woman in Gold, drew crowds that wound around the block.

Like other institutions, museums have specialties and rivalries. When the Metropolitan rejected the millionaire heiress Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney's fine collection of American art, she established a museum of her own, which recently moved from its East 75th location (east of the Museum Mile, it may be noted), which was acquired by the Met. The new Whitney, relocated near the Hudson River in the Meatpacking District, designed by the noted Italian architect Renzo Piano, features six floors of shapely galleries, four open-air terraces, screening spaces, and dining areas. One of its opening shows, America Is Hard to See (a line from a Robert Frost poem) has received enthusiastic reviews.

Vast as its museum trove may be, New York has brilliant rivals--from Washington, DC, with its array of Smithsonian museums, to Paris, with the Louvre and Pompidou, Chicago, with the Art Institute of Chicago, the Vatican, with its immense collection in its many museums, and Mexico City, with its multitude of museums. 

All very well and good, except they are hardly accessible by bus or subway.