No trip to New York City is complete without experiencing some of its world-class cultural institutions, and Museum Mile is a good place to start. This stretch of Fifth Avenue, from East 82nd to East 105th Streets—actually measuring a little longer than a mile—lays claim to one of the world's densest concentrations of culture. Museums along the "Mile" include The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Neue Galerie, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the National Academy Museum & School, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum (closed for renovation through the fall of 2014), the Jewish Museum, the Museum of the City of New York and El Museo del Barrio.

Just a short walk away from Museum Mile, the Whitney Museum of American Art showcases one of the nation's premier collections of works by 20th-century American and contemporary masters. (Note: the Whitney will close in October 2014 in preparation to move to its new home in the Meatpacking District.) Just across Central Park, meanwhile, the mammoth American Museum of Natural History and the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space feature larger-than-life science exhibitions. And a block south, the City's oldest museum, the New-York Historical Society, underwent an extensive renovation and expansion in 2011 and introduced the DiMenna Children's History Museum.

The European masterpieces of the Frick Collection are housed in Henry Clay Frick's magnificent Fifth Avenue mansion, and Midtown's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is home to some of the world's most important contemporary artworks. Uptown, the Studio Museum in Harlem showcases the work of black artists, while the Cloisters houses an impressive collection of medieval art juxtaposed with the museum's gorgeous architecture; it also offers charming gardens and stunning views of the Hudson. Brooklyn Museum, one of the largest and oldest art museums in the country, boasts a wide-ranging collection that spans cultures and artistic movements in its Beaux Arts home at the northern end of Prospect Park.