The Museo Del Barrio, sometimes simply referred to as "El Museo," is a museum dedicated to primarily Puerto Rican Art. The institution was born out of East Harlem protests in the late 1960s that called for education in neighborhood public schools to include curricula that acknowledged and addressed the heritage of many of the families whose children attended these schools. A group of Central and East Harlem activists demanded for resources to be made available to students. In response, Superintendent Martin W. Frey of District 4 appointed Puerto Rican educator and activist Raphael Montaña Ortiz to create the educational materials necessary for this change. In response, Montaña Ortiz formed the idea to create a community-based museum that would supplement this necessity. A museum "del Barrio" (of the neighborhood) would be accessible to all ages, not just those attending the schools of District 4. East Harlem's primarily Puerto-Rican and Caribbean population needed to also benefit from this asset in their community. The endeavor was funded by the Board of Education from 1969-1974, which enabled Montaña Ortiz to travel to Puerto Rico and make connections with local museums and anthropologists alongside Superintendent Martin W. Frey. Additionally, Montaña Ortiz visited museums across New York City to survey their collections of Puerto-Rican Art. Montaña Ortiz was conscious to involve the immediate community in discussions of the project, along with members of The Young Lords Political Party, The Real Great Society, and Marcos Dimas and Adrian Garcia who would later form the Art Worker's Coalition. The museum was founded in a classroom of PS 125 at 425 West 123rd Street, where District 4's offices were also located. Montaña Ortiz said the following of the museum: "The cultural disenfranchisement I experience as a Puerto Rican has prompted me to seek a practical alternative to the orthodox museum, which fails to meet my needs for an authentic ethnic experience. To afford me and others to establish living connections with our own culture, I founded El Museo del Barrio." El Museo del Barrio moved from the PS 125 to PS 206 and then subsequent storefronts in the vicinity. El Museo later moved to an old firehouse on 104th street, where it launched it's "Mobile Unit" that traveled to serve schools and events. Eventually, in 1977, El Museo settled in the Heckscher Building on 104th Street, where it occupied the ground floor. In this move, it joined the Cultural Institutions Group (CIG), an association of 23 cultural organizations housed in city-owned buildings. El Museo is the founding member of the Museum Mile. The permanent collection of El Museo del Barrio spans over 800 years of Puerto-Rican, Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Art. There are now around 6,500 pieces in the collection, and El Museo hosts a variety of temporary exhibitions on Puerto-Rican and Latin American Modern Art. Additionally, the institution is the site for many festivals, educational programs, and events. The most well known and widely attended festivity is the parade for Three Kings Day in January. The museum underwent a renovation and expansion in 2009 and another renovation of its theater from 2018 to 2019. In 2012, an exhibition at now-defunct gallery Exit Art and a subsequent publication called "Alternative Histories" said that El Museo del Barrio went from alternative art space to a globally established museum. In El Museo's mission statement, it states the following: "To enhance the sense of identity, self-esteem and self-knowledge of the Caribbean and Latin American peoples by educating them in their artistic heritage and bringing art and artists into their communities."

Artist and educator Raphael Montañez Ortiz and a coalition of Puerto Rican activists founded El Museo del Barrio in 1970 to combat the city’s institutional indifference to Puerto Rican art and culture. Over the past five decades, El Museo has become a major institution celebrating and promoting Latin American art, with a permanent collection of over 6,500 objects spanning 800 years of history. El Museo also performs outreach and education for young people of Caribbean and Latin American descent to enhance their understanding of and pride in their heritage. El Museo’s permanent home since 1977 is a building commissioned by philanthropists August and Anna Heckscher for the headquarters of The Heckscher Foundation for Children, and donated to the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children as a shelter for abused and neglected children. Its interior features a series of tile murals on the ground floor depicting storybook tales and children at play, which El Museo restored in 2008-12, as well as the Heckscher Theater, which hosted performances for and by children. El Museo undertook a renovation of the theater in 1995-2000, renaming it Teatro Heckscher.

Fifth Avenue alongside Central Park is one of New York's most recognizable locales. This walk focuses on the institutions that lend this turf its name: the Museum Mile!

New York City is known for many things: Art Deco skyscrapers, picturesque parks, the world’s greatest theater district, venerable museums and educational institutions, not to mention bagels and pizza! But above all of these, New York is most important as home to some of the world’s most fascinating and significant people and as the site of impactful and significant happenings throughout history. The city’s cultural influence is, perhaps, its greatest contribution to the world, and its built environment stands as a grand scavenger hunt of clues waiting to be uncovered. Lucky for us, the city’s Landmarks Law, passed in 1965, provides the legal framework for protecting the physical reminders of the city’s cultural wealth. In fact, one of the stated purposes of the Landmarks Law is to “safeguard the city’s historic, aesthetic and cultural heritage.” In the first 50 years that landmarks were designated by the City, much emphasis was placed on the historic and aesthetic. In recent years, though, more consideration has been made for the importance of sites associated with people or historical events, rather than just for their architectural or historical value. In 2015, the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) designated the Stonewall Inn as an Individual Landmark solely for its association with the Stonewall Uprising of 1969. In 2018, the Commission designated the Central Harlem—West 130th-132nd Streets Historic District, describing it as “not only representative of Central Harlem’s residential architecture, but the rich social, cultural, and political life of its African American population in the 20th century.” Also, in recent years, Greenwich Village’s Caffe Cino and Julius’ Bar were listed on the National Register of Historic Places as significant and influential sites connected to the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LGBTQ) community, The New York Times profiled a historian giving tours of Muslim sites of significance in Harlem, and the City is commemorating some of our most storied and accomplished female citizens with the installation of statues in all five boroughs. Indeed, grassroots preservation activism around the city is also swelling around sites of cultural significance: Tin Pan Alley and Little Syria in Manhattan, Walt Whitman’s house in Brooklyn, Arthur Avenue in The Bronx and a recently-rediscovered African burial ground in Queens, to name a few. In response to this movement of interest in cultural landmarks, the Historic Districts Council undertook an initiative to highlight such places as one of its Six to Celebrate in 2018. The culmination of that effort was a conference in October 2018 entitled “Beyond Bricks and Mortar: Rethinking Sites of Cultural History.” The conference convened preservationists, historians, artists, planners, place-makers and more to work together to clarify what cultural significance is and how it can work, how to document and create compelling narratives around cultural sites, and how to identify the specific challenges of cultural sites from a preservationist perspective. This tour provides just a sample of some of the city’s cultural landmarks, organized thematically and representing all five boroughs. The list includes some sites that are legally protected — in some cases by more than one government body — and some that are unfortunately in danger of being lost. Preserving culturally significant sites that may not possess overtly aesthetic value often requires a particularly active and engaged form of advocacy to achieve protection from the wrecking ball. But, as long as there are interesting people making their mark on New York City and crucial events taking place here, that effort will never be in vain, since those stories are the lifeblood of this vibrant place.