New York holds roughly 145 museums and more than 500 galleries, but its culture lives as much in a 90-seat East Village theatre as in a marble atrium. These three days move from Modernist collections to Harlem jazz rooms and Bushwick studio blocks.
11 West 53rd Street. Opens 10:30 (10:00 for members); queue by 09:00 at the 54th Street entrance for the shortest wait. Van Gogh's Starry Night, Picasso's Demoiselles and Monet's Water Lilies room sit across floors 4 and 5.
375 Park Avenue, Mies van der Rohe with Philip Johnson, 1958 — the bronze-and-bronze-glass tower that invented the corporate plaza. The travertine lobby and Johnson's former Four Seasons space are open to walk-ins during lunch hours.
1071 Fifth Avenue. Frank Lloyd Wright's 1959 spiral holds the Thannhauser collection — Kandinsky, Léger, early Picasso — plus rotating rotunda commissions. Open 11:00-18:00, until 20:00 Saturdays.
1048 Fifth Avenue, in a 1914 Carrère & Hastings mansion. Klimt's gold Adele Bloch-Bauer I hangs on the second floor alongside Schiele and Kokoschka; the Bauhaus and Werkbund design rooms are on three. Closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
99 Margaret Corbin Drive, Washington Heights. Five medieval French cloisters reassembled above the Hudson in 1938, holding the seven Unicorn Tapestries and the Mérode Altarpiece. Opens 10:00, closed Wednesdays.
58 West 129th Street. A small archive-driven space built around the Savory Collection of 1930s radio recordings, with listening stations and free afternoon 'Harlem Speaks' talks by working musicians in the front room.
10 Lincoln Center Plaza. The 90-minute guided tour covers the Metropolitan Opera House with its Chagall murals, David Geffen Hall and the Vivian Beaumont, subject to rehearsal schedules. Depart from the David Rubenstein Atrium on Broadway at 62nd.
20 Lincoln Center Plaza. Philip Johnson's 1964 house with its Jasper Johns backdrop; Balanchine repertory runs autumn and winter, Nutcracker from late November. Curtain usually 19:30, Sunday matinees 15:00.
Access is by timed guided tour only, from 10:00. 'Tenement Women' and 'A Union of Hope: 1869' walk you through restored apartments of Irish, German and Jewish families in a building sealed in 1935 and reopened as an archive.
28 West 27th Street, third floor. A working letterpress and bindery since 1974, with free exhibitions of artists' books, broadside poetry commissions and printers on the floor presses you can watch. Open Tuesday to Saturday.
Starting at St Nicholas Avenue and Troutman Street. Since 2011 Joe Ficalora has invited muralists to paint warehouse walls across roughly 15 blocks; the surrounding buildings hold working studios with open doors on weekday afternoons.
136 Metropolitan Avenue. A 1926 vaudeville house turned dine-in repertory theatre, running 35mm midnights, director retrospectives and the long-standing Deuce series of grindhouse prints alongside first-run independents.