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Culture, Education, and Recreation

Culture

New York City is widely viewed as the United States' cultural crossroads as well as its corporate center. New Yorkers make it a point to have the best selection of films, concerts, plays, exhibits, lectures, and sports events. New Yorkers also pride themselves on being discerning critics. To achieve success, or "make it," in New York is to perform at the highest level.

The museums are a cultural life unto themselves: the Metropolitan Museum of Art , a monumental edifice set into the edge of Central Park, is one of the world's leading museums. It is a vast storehouse containing well over 200 galleries and, among other treasures, more than 2,000 European paintings, some 3,000 American paintings and works of sculpture, and the entire ancient Egyptian Temple of Dendur.

In the same Upper East Side locale are the museums that were established by the fabulously wealthy businessmen-collectors: Guggenheim (an eye-catching spiraling structure designed by Frank Lloyd Wright), Frick, Cooper-Hewitt, and slightly farther south, Morgan. The Guggenheim specializes in modern art, while the Frick which is housed in the opulent former mansion of the Pittsburgh industrialist Henry Clay Frick displays paintings by the old masters. The richly decorated Morgan Library, established by the banker J. Pierpont Morgan, features rare books, manuscripts, engravings, and drawings, while the Cooper-Hewitt is now the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Design and the Decorative Arts and is housed in Andrew Carnegie's former mansion. The Metropolitan, Guggenheim, Cooper-Hewitt, and several other institutions located along Fifth Avenue between 79th and 104th streets constitute New York's Museum Mile.

Across the park from the Museum Mile is the American Museum of Natural History and the Hayden Planetarium. Perhaps the most distinctive museum in New York, however, is the haunting Cloisters at the north tip of Manhattan on a hill overlooking the Hudson. Constructed in the form of a medieval monastery and incorporating pieces of medieval churches and abbeys, this repository of medieval art owes its existence to John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

Classical music is also a New York staple. In Carnegie Hall (remodeled in 1986), Avery Fisher and Alice Tully halls both part of the Lincoln Center complex and the Brooklyn Academy of Music perform some of the finest classical musicians from all over the world. Classical concerts are also offered at many of the city's museums. The opera houses, particularly the Metropolitan and New York City operas at Lincoln Center, also draw enthusiastic audiences, and various resident and visiting dance companies offer full seasons of classical ballet and modern works at Lincoln and City centers.

Motion pictures are also a part of New York life. Movie theaters, located all over the city, always have the latest Hollywood releases as well as a wide selection of more narrowly distributed works, especially those by foreign directors.

The city is also the home of two of the United States celebrated daily newspapers, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal , as well as numerous local tabloids and many, if not most, of the best-known national magazines. The eminent dean of these magazines is The New Yorker, a venerable institution dating from 1925.

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