The Metropolitan Museum of Art was established on April 13, 1870, and moved into its Fifth Avenue building in 1880. That first building, of red brick and stone, was designed by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould. The Beaux-Arts facade, Great Hall and Grand Stairway came later, designed by Richard Morris Hunt and his son Richard Howland Hunt in the late 1890s and early 1900s. McKim, Mead & White completed the Fifth Avenue wings in 1910.
The museum kept growing, with the Robert Lehman Wing, the American Wing, the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing and a wing for the Temple of Dendur, assembled in 1978. Roche-Dinkeloo designed the modern glass sides and rear. The Fifth Avenue building has more than 2 million square feet (190,000 sq m) of floor space.
The collection numbers about 2 million works, and 5,727,258 people visited in 2024. The Met Cloisters, in Fort Tryon Park, was completed in 1938.
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