The Morgan Library & Museum

Pierpont Morgan built his private library next to his Madison Avenue brownstone in 1906, hiring Charles McKim to raise a marble palazzo for his manuscripts — and McKim set its foundation stones without mortar, Greek-style, just to prove it could still be done. The heart of the museum is that original complex: Morgan's study, red-damasked and brooding, and the East Room, a three-tier canyon of bookcases under a painted ceiling, holding Gutenberg Bibles and medieval bindings.

Around the old rooms, a Renzo Piano-designed court of glass and steel knits the campus together and fills it with daylight — a good café sits in it — while rotating exhibitions upstairs draw from one of the world's great collections of drawings, music manuscripts, and literary originals. It's the Met's opposite: compact, intense, finishable in an afternoon, and all the more affecting for it.