Museum Mile: the Met and the Fifth Avenue museums
The Met steps, the Guggenheim spiral, and the stretch of Fifth Avenue with more art than most countries. This is a Claude-drafted route awaiting the editor's walk.

1. The Met steps
Walk down to 82nd Street first and sit on the steps before you go in — the city does its people-watching here. Inside, the scale defeats everyone; pick two wings and admit defeat on the rest. Pay-what-you-wish only if you can prove you're a New York State resident.

2. The reservoir and the park wall
Cross to the park side and walk the low stone wall north. The Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir is the silver sheet beyond the running track — forty acres of water with the West Side skyline stood up behind it. You don't have to run it; most people are just walking.

3. Neue Galerie
The smallest of the mile and the most particular — German and Austrian art in a Fifth Avenue mansion, Klimt's gold *Adele* in the front room. Café Sabarsky downstairs does the Viennese cake properly. Closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays; check before you climb the steps.

4. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Frank Lloyd Wright's white spiral, finished in 1959 and still arguing with every building around it. Take the lift to the top and walk down the ramp — that's the way Wright meant you to see it. The building outpaints most of what hangs in it, and that's allowed.

5. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
Design, not fine art — housed in Andrew Carnegie's old mansion, which is half the point. The garden behind it is one of the few you can sit in on this stretch without paying for a museum. Worth it for the house alone.

6. The Jewish Museum
Another Gothic mansion, the Warburg house, with a serious collection of Jewish art and history across four thousand years. The ground-floor café (Russ & Daughters) does the appetising the Lower East Side is famous for, this far uptown. End here and walk over to 96th Street for the 6.

Museum Mile: the Met and the Fifth Avenue museums