The Morgan Library & Museum

Housed in the Morgan family’s former abode, the Morgan Library & Museum is worth the trip if only to see how the other half once lived. The house itself has been converted into a three-story museum—currently showing European drawings, illustrations by famed “New Yorker”–artist Saul Steinberg (that’s his most famous cover at left), and Victorian-era manuscripts and first editions (lots of stuff by Dickens and Collins)—but the library remains much as it was in Pierpont Morgan’s nineteenth-century day.

It comprises hundreds of square feet across a hallway and two rooms, a traditional sitting room and a library with four tiers of bookcases encircling the room, right up to the very high ceiling. Charles McKim of the McKim, Mead, and White architectural firm designed the library to resemble an Italian Renaissance palazzo. On display when we visited was a Guttenberg Bible (one of three owned by the library), as well as copies of books once opened by Napoleon and Schopenhauer. (How do we know who once owned the books? Because the previous owners’ names were stamped on the books’ leather bindings.)