Designated a landmark by the City of New York on both its interior and exterior, the Met is a must-see for any visitor to the city and a staple for any New Yorker with even the slightest interest in art or culture. Its grand Beaux Arts facade, fronted by a sprawling staircase and graceful fountains facing Fifth Avenue, are among the most iconic images of New York, and form the anchor of the Upper East Side’s elegant Museum Mile.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art was officially chartered by an Act of Incorporation of the New York State Legislature on April 13, 1870, “for the purpose of establishing and maintaining in said City a Museum and Library of Art, of encouraging and developing the Study of the Fine Arts, and the application of Art to manufacture and natural life, of advancing the general knowledge of kindred subjects, and to that end of furnishing popular instruction and recreations.”

The museum first opened in 1872 in a no longer-extant former mansion at 681 Fifth Avenue near 54th Street. Led by a combination of industrialists and artists, the museum began with a modest collection of about 175 mostly European paintings and a Roman stone sarcophagus. In 1873 the Museum made an important leap forward in its quest to gain its desired stature. They acquired a collection of over 6,000 pieces of Cypriot art and artifacts, which meant their Midtown home would no longer be adequate for their holdings. They soon went about commissioning a new purpose-built home — their first — that would fulfill their aspirations and leave room to grow.

The Met negotiated a deal with the City of New York allowing them to sway over the section of the park between East Drive and Fifth Avenue, 79th and 85th Streets. Construction of that first building that became the foundation of the Met’s nearly century-and-half residency in Central Park began in 1874, with a structure designed by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould, architects of most of the early buildings and structures in Central Park.

The new building, designed in the Victorian Gothic style and located well inside Central Park rather than along Fifth Avenue, opened to the public on March 30, 1880, with U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes presiding over the dedication. The new building was designed in a “picturesque” tradition, meant to look as if it was a well-worn structure that had been there as long as the natural terrain around it — very different from the grand, formal look the museum is known for today.

With the equivalent of six city blocks to build upon and an ever-growing collection, the original Vaux building did not remain alone for long. In fact, Vaux was one of a team of architects who devised a master plan for the museum’s long-term expansion, parts of which were executed almost as soon as the original building opened. Two new wings were quickly added — the south wing designed by architect Theodore Weston, in 1884-88, and the north wing, designed by Weston in collaboration with architect Arthur L. Tuckerman, in 1889-94.

Soon after, though, the Met’s trustees began to plan a very different future for the museum, leaving behind Vaux’s quainter, picturesque image of rough-hewn buildings scattered in a naturalistic landscape. The World Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago unleashed the “City Beautiful” or “White City” movement in America, and suddenly grand, neo-Classical or Beaux Arts buildings made of crisp white marble and stone, placed on formal axes with greenery as accents rather than holistic setting, were de rigueur. And the image of the Met we know today was born.

The architect Richard Morris Hunt, chairman of the museum building committee, was given the commission to plan new structures and a new master plan for future expansion that would embody this aesthetic. Hunt designed a monumental structure based on Classical Roman prototypes. It was to be built east of the three existing structures, orienting the museum towards Fifth Avenue rather than the park, and creating a formal axis with the main entrance along 82nd Street.

Hunt’s death in 1895 delayed the course of construction, but execution of his distinctly Beaux Arts vision for the museum was carried out by his son, Richard Howland Hunt, and by Hunt Sr.’s protege, architect George B. Post. The main building which forms the entrance to and the visual identity of the Met opened in 1902, with three grand arches surrounded by four sets of two-story high pairs of Corinthian columns atop a grand staircase.

The majestic new building was an immediate hit. The New York Evening Post described it as “the most noteworthy building of its kind in the city, one of the finest in the world, and the only public building of recent years which approaches in dignity and grandeur the museums of the old world.” Regarding the new Grand Hall (designated an interior landmark in 1977) through which the public entered the museum, the New York Times said “the great staircase and large hall are unlike anything else in the city, but are as large, finely proportioned, and elaborate in decoration as the great court of the Louvre and the staircase of the National Gallery in London.

The Met’s expansion continued almost unceasingly after the opening of the main building. The renowned architectural firm of McKim Mead & White, adopting Hunt’s master plan to one of their own, was responsible for many of the museum’s Beaux Arts additions along Fifth Avenue north and south of the main entrance, built between 1906 and 1926. The American Wing was added in 1922-24 by Grosvenor Atterbury. In 1967 in anticipation of its centennial, the museum (which had just been designated a landmark by the City of New York) commissioned a new master plan from the firm of Kevin Roche, John Dinkeloo & Associates.

As a result, the grand entrance staircase, formerly a tight, formal approach which only went straight up and down from the entrance, was opened up to spill out to the north and south as well as the east, making it one of the great public gathering, sitting, and observing spots in New York. The museum now consists of more than twenty structures, and is more than twenty times larger than the original 1880 structure.