While Henry Clay Frick started collecting art as soon as he began amassing a fortune, he ordered its final resting place constructed in 1912. Designed by Thomas Hastings, the Frick house was always intended as a museum to highlight the art and furniture that Frick had acquired. Altered by John Russel Pope in the 1930s, the Frick has endeavored to adhere to that wish ever since.

Now largest art museum in the United States, the Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded by a group of businessmen and incorporated by New York State in 1870. The Met occupied two other homes before constructing its current home on Fifth Avenue (designed by famed architects Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould in the Gothic-Revival style in 1880). However, due to its many additions and renovations, the image most associated with the museum is its Beaux-Art facade and Great Hall- both of which were later additions by Richard Morris Hunt.

Though it did not become a museum for Austrian and German art until 1994, the Neue Galerie building was designed by some of New York's most prominent architects. Carrere and Hastings designed the William Starr Miller House and much of its original Louis XIII style is still on display for visitors to enjoy whilst in the Galerie.

Now named after its founder, the Guggenheim began its life on East 54th Street as the "Museum of Non-Objective Painting" in 1937. Though Frank Lloyd Wright was commissioned to design a permanent home in 1943, the Guggenheim wouldn't receive its current name until 1952, nor its present home until 1959.

Unlike Frick, his business partner, Carnegie did not intend his home to become a museum when he built in 1902. At the time it was so far north and unpopulated that Carnegie's mansion actually gave the neighborhood, Carnegie Hill, its name. The first private residence to built on a steel frame, it also was one of the first to have an Otis elevator and central heating. It was not until 1972, when the Carnegie Corporation gifted the estate to the Smithsonian, that the Carnegie Mansion began its museum evolution. It now houses the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum and is one of the three Smithsonian institutions in New York.

The first Jewish Museum in America and the oldest extant Jewish Museum in the world is housed in the 1908 Warburg Mansion. Designed by C.P.H. Gilbert for the banker Felix Warburg, Warburg's wife donated it in 1944 following Warburg's death to create a lasting home for the Jewish Museum. The collection, which had previously been maintained by the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, was made available to the public for the first time in 1947 and has been on display here ever since.

Founded in 1923 by Henry Collins Brown and first housed in Gracie Mansion (which now serves as the Mayoral Residence), the Museum of the City of New York found its new home when the city offered a plot of land on Fifth Avenue. In 1932, Thomas H. Freedlander completed the museum's new Georgian Colonial-Revival style home here.

Normally shortened to "El Museo", the Museo Del Barrio was created to serve the needs of a greatly diversifying city and to celebrate and highlight the culture and heritage of many of its Hispanic inhabitants (specifically New York's Puerto Rican community). Beginning in a public school classroom and then occupying multiple storefronts, El Museo didn't inhabit its current space until 1977. It was in that year that "El Museo" occupied the neoclassical Hecksher building at 1230 Fifth Avenue, securing its place at the top of the Museum Mile.