April 13, 1870: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Is Founded In New York

April 13, 1870: The Metropolitan Museum of Art is founded in New York. It opens a physical location on February 20, 1872, at 681 5th Avenue, at 54th Street -- right around the corner from where its eventual rival, the Museum of Modern Art, would be built.

Its permanent location opened on March 30, 1880, at 1000 5th Avenue, just inside Central Park from 80th to 84th Streets, with its main entrance at 82nd. The Museum is directly across Central Park, 1 mile away, from the American Museum of Natural History. Both would be hallmarks of the Gilded Age.

The Great Hall at the 82nd Street entrance

The stretch of 5th Avenue alongside the Park is known as Museum Mile, and also includes the Frick Collection at 70th Street, the Ukrainian Institute of America at 79th, Neue Galerie New York at 86th, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum at 88th, the Cooper Hewitt Museum at 91st, the Jewish Museum at 92nd, and the Museum of the City of New York and the Hispanic-themed Museo del Barrio, on opposite sides of 104th.

The permanent collection of "The Met" -- not to be confused with the Metropolitan Opera, or its House at Lincoln Center, or Citi Field, home of baseball's New York Mets -- has works of art from all over the world: Ancient Egypt, Greece, Byzantine, Islamic art, Asia and the Pacific Rim. It has encyclopedic collections of musical instruments, costumes, decorative arts, textiles, interior designs, jewelry, weapons and armor.

Among the well-known paintings are Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zúñiga (a.k.a. The Red Boy) by Francisco Goya, Portrait of Madame X by John Singer Sargent, Self-portrait with Straw Hat by Vincent van Gogh, The Card Players by Paul Cézanne, The Gulf Stream by Winslow Homer, and I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold by Charles Demuth.

The Museum also contains works by Michelangelo Caravaggio (usually referred to by his surname, so he's not confused with Michelangelo Buonarotti), Rembrandt van Rijn (usually referred to by his first name), Johannes Vermeer, Eugene Delacroix, Pablo Picasso, and, confusing some, Édouard Manet and Claude Monet.

There are also some noteworthy statues, including a copy of Augustus Saint-Gaudens' nude of the archer goddess Diana. But this is not the version that topped the 1891-1925 version of Madison Square Garden, 56 blocks down 5th Avenue. That one is at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. (You know, the one whose steps Rocky Balboa ran up.) Ironically, it was a Philadelphia art critic who wrote a savage review of the statue.

The Met established the world's first museum shop in 1908, and it's worth a visit all by itself. In 1954, it opened the Grace Rainey Rogers Concert Hall, and the classical concerts staged there proved so successful, they started an art lecture series there in 1956.

Today, The Met is the largest art museum in America, in terms of exhibition space, and the 4th-largest in the world, behind the Louvre in Paris, the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, and the British Museum in London. It ranks 3rd, behind the British Museum and the Hermitage, in number of objects available to display. It is the 3rd-most-visited museum in the U.S., behind the National Museum of Natural History and the National Gallery of Art, both of them part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

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April 13, 1870 was a Wednesday. Baseball was the only team sport in North America at the time, and the season hadn't started yet. So there were no scores on this historic day.