The Met New York: What to See at the Metropolitan, Tickets and The Cloisters

Going back to New York is a bit like visiting a friend you haven’t seen since high school. You try not to have expectations, you try not to leave room for doubts, and meanwhile your mind keeps working: will she be the same? Will she have aged? Will we still be able to surprise each other? I had three and a half days, a flight I’d stumbled on at an indecently low price, and a tiredness that just wouldn’t lift. And the city that never sleeps, as everyone knows, isn’t exactly the place you go to rest.

On the afternoon of the second day my feet refused to climb yet another escalator. That’s when I discovered the thing that saved my trip and became the reason for this guide: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Met, isn’t just the largest museum in New York. It’s the place where the city lowers its voice. And it isn’t even one museum: it’s two, an hour apart by subway, and you visit both on the same ticket. Here you’ll find what it really costs to get in, how the two locations work, what to see without walking out exhausted, and the two courtyards where I found silence again.

The Met is two museums on one ticket

The first thing to know is also the one almost nobody tells you in time, and it’s the one that changes how you plan your day. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has two locations: the monumental one on Fifth Avenue, at the edge of Central Park, and The Met Cloisters, at the northern tip of Manhattan, which houses medieval European art inside a building made from pieces of real cloisters. They are two different worlds: one is an encyclopedia of the world, the other a monastery overlooking the Hudson.

There’s just one ticket and it covers both, exhibitions included. But watch out for the condition written at the bottom of the official page: admission to the two locations is valid on the same day, the one printed on the ticket. It’s not three days, it’s not a pass to spread across your vacation: if you want to see both without paying twice, they have to go on the same day. Believe me, it’s a full day and not a fallback: in between there’s almost an hour of subway and about a thousand years.

Met tickets, hours and prices: what it really costs

Here’s the most widespread misunderstanding among foreign travelers, and it’s worth clearing up before it costs you time at the ticket desk. For years people have said that at the Met “you pay what you want.” That’s no longer the case, and it isn’t for you anyway: the pay-what-you-wish rate still exists, but it’s reserved for New York State residents and for students from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, who must pay at least one cent and show ID. Everyone else pays full price. In 2018 I paid $25, and even then it felt like a lot: today it’s thirty.

The opening hours are the second thing to note down, because the Met has a closing day that throws visitors from Europe off: Wednesday, at both locations. Fifth Avenue is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday through Tuesday and on Thursday, and stays open until 9 p.m. on Friday and Saturday; The Cloisters close at 5 p.m. on every open day. The museum is also closed on Thanksgiving, December 25 and January 1, and Fifth Avenue alone on the first Monday in May, the night of the Met Gala.

Practical tip: the Met states that reservations are not required and that tickets can also be bought at the desk. In other words: the “skip-the-line” tickets sold here and there save you from a line that usually isn’t there. What is worth the money, if anything, is a guide, because two thousand years of stuff without a thread is an elegant way of seeing nothing: alternatively, the ticket with a digital tour lets you go at your own pace with a well-thought-out route already in your ears.

The Astor Court, where the museum stops making noise

That afternoon, sitting in a Starbucks with a cappuccino going cold, I was trying to remember the title of a little book that had landed on our editorial desk years before: a sort of vade mecum of the quiet places of New York. I never found it again, neither in my memory nor online. But with the last sip the right place came back to me: the Astor Court, gallery 217.

It’s a Ming-style Chinese garden court rebuilt inside the museum, modeled on a courtyard in Suzhou, made possible by a gift from the Vincent Astor Foundation and opened in 1981. Taihu rocks, a granite terrace, columns of nan wood, a small pond, a pavilion with a curved roof. Above, a skylight lets in a light that always seems like early morning, even when the sun is beating down on Fifth Avenue outside.

It’s an unwritten rule at the Met to treat the Astor Court as a kind of sanctuary: people speak softly and phones stay in pockets.

Nobody enforces it and no sign says so: it just happens. Visitors walk through the colonnades in a state of rêverie that, in this city, is worth more than a good many of the works on display. I had sat down to read the museum guide, and while I was reading, a local woman sat next to me and asked if it was my first time in New York. Her name was Marla. It turned into one of those conversations that only happen between someone traveling alone and someone looking for someone to talk to, and it was she who sent me to the cloisters, at the top of the island, and then insisted I spend a day at the botanical garden. I followed both pieces of advice. I was right to.

What to see at The Met Fifth Avenue without walking out exhausted

The Met is too big to be “seen.” The only strategy that works, and it applies to any encyclopedic museum, is to choose three or four sections and let go of the rest with a clear conscience. Here are the ones I recommend to first-time visitors.

• The Temple of Dendur (gallery 131): an authentic Egyptian temple, completed by 10 B.C., given by Egypt to the United States in recognition of its help in saving the monuments of Nubia from the waters of the Aswan Dam. It stands in a glass-walled gallery overlooking Central Park, and it’s the museum’s great coup de théâtre. If Egypt grabs you, the natural comparison in Italy is the Egyptian Museum in Turin.
• The Astor Court (gallery 217), mentioned above: a pause, not a stop.
• The American Wing, which turns one hundred this year: it’s where you understand how the United States told its own story.
• The European paintings, 1300-1800, recently reinstalled: for once, looking at “our” paintings from far away has a strange and instructive effect.

Heads up: the Met always has some sections closed for renovation, and they aren’t minor ones. At the time of writing, the closures affect, in whole or in part, the modern and contemporary art galleries, the galleries of ancient West Asian and Cypriot art, and the Cantor Roof Garden, the rooftop terrace. The list changes constantly: the closures page on the museum’s official website is updated almost daily, so check it the morning of your visit.

The Met Cloisters: medieval Europe in Fort Tryon Park

Let’s start by clearing up a misconception that gets around a lot, and that was even in the first version of this article: The Cloisters are not in the Bronx. They’re in Fort Tryon Park, in upper Manhattan, at 99 Margaret Corbin Drive. The Bronx is home to the botanical garden, which is the stop in the next section. They are two different places, in two different boroughs, and mixing them up costs you an hour of subway in the wrong direction.

The Cloisters are the Met’s medieval branch, and the building is constructed around real European cloisters, taken apart and reassembled here: the one from Cuxa, in the Pyrenees, with its slender pink marble columns, is the heart of the whole. Inside you’ll find The Unicorn Rests in a Garden, the most famous of the Unicorn Tapestries, woven between 1495 and 1505; the Annunciation Triptych known as the Mérode Altarpiece; the Belles Heures of the Duke of Berry; even a fifteenth-century deck of playing cards and an astrolabe from 1462. The gardens grow the plants that appeared in medieval herbals and tapestries, and that’s the whole difference from Fifth Avenue: here time is measured in seasons.

Tip: at The Cloisters there are free tours almost every day, included in the ticket: the Garden Tour at 11 a.m. and the Highlights of The Cloisters at 1 p.m. Nobody sells them to you and there’s nothing to book, you just wait. From April to October there’s also the open-air Trie Café, which is the right place for lunch. An accessibility note the museum states and that’s worth knowing in advance: from the main entrance to the admissions desk there’s a cobblestone path and about sixty steps, but there is a free shuttle for anyone who needs step-free access.

How to get to the Met and The Cloisters

The Met Fifth Avenue is at 1000 Fifth Avenue, on the Upper East Side, with its grand steps facing the street and Central Park behind it: you can get there by subway in a few minutes from half of Manhattan. The Cloisters are much farther up, and the journey is part of the experience: the A train takes you almost right into Fort Tryon Park, and the climb through the greenery peels the city off you one block at a time. Allow a good forty minutes from one location to the other.

In Manhattan, a car is a complication, not a solution: the subway and your legs are enough for everything. If, on the other hand, New York is the first stop on a longer trip across the United States, things change as soon as you leave the city, and we’ve written about it both in the general guide on what to see in America and, for the Atlantic coast, in the piece on Boston. One last thing that concerns driving rather than the museum: in the United States the rules on how to behave with the police aren’t the ones Europeans are used to, and it’s worth knowing them beforehand.

If you’re still looking for silence: the New York Botanical Garden

Marla’s second tip was in the Bronx, and it took me a whole day. The New York Botanical Garden covers 250 acres, and the reason its founders chose that very land, in 1895, is still there to see: the Thain Family Forest, which the garden describes as the largest remaining uncut tract of New York City’s original forest. You walk through it on trails that were once Native American hunting paths, under trees that were already standing at the time of the American Revolution. In the fall the colors are those of New England foliage, without leaving the city.

The other half of the visit is the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, the great Victorian glass-and-iron greenhouse where the Orchid Show is staged every spring. That’s where Marla’s words make sense, that orchids are “the best way to breathe in the most intoxicating of New York experiences.” Literally.

Tip: the garden is open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday, and the All-Garden Pass costs $35 on weekdays and $39 on weekends. But there’s a combination worth knowing: on Wednesdays the Met is closed, and on Wednesdays the botanical garden lets all visitors into the grounds for free between 10 and 11 a.m. If your Wednesday in New York looked like a lost day, now you know where to spend it. Free admission doesn’t include the conservatory or special exhibitions, which are still ticketed.

On the last half day, restored by the calm of the Big Apple, I happily let myself be swept up again by the frenzy of shopping. After all, could I really leave New York without a few little, not-so-little souvenirs? But what has stayed with me, years later, isn’t the shopping bag: it’s that this huge, brazen city keeps, for anyone who asks it for a break, a Ming courtyard, a cloister from the Pyrenees, an ancient forest and a free reading room inside the library on Fifth Avenue. New York doesn’t slow down for anyone. But if you ask nicely, it always has a place to sit.

Two practical things before you leave, and they apply to the United States in general more than to the museum. The first is insurance: in the US healthcare is private and an emergency room bill looks like nothing we know in Europe, so a travel insurance policy is one of those expenses you make hoping you’ve wasted the money; if you want to understand what it really covers, we’ve written an honest review. The second is your phone: if you’re coming from Europe, the United States is outside EU roaming, so either you add a plan from your carrier or you’re better off with a data eSIM, which you install before you leave and works as soon as you land.

Frequently asked questions about the Met in New York