New York doesn’t just have museums. It has more than 170 of them — and depending on how you count, the number gets much bigger. The city’s Economic Development Corporation puts the five boroughs at more than 800 museums and galleries combined, and the Museums Council of New York City alone speaks for 117 organizations. Whatever the official figure, the point is the same: no other city on earth collects culture quite like this one.

And it’s not confined to one district. The museums stretch through Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island — a city built from distinct neighborhoods, and generations of people arriving from across the country and around the world.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art sits at the center of it all, with collections spanning more than 5,000 years. You can walk from ancient Egypt to Greek and Roman art, European painting, Asian art, American decorative arts, fashion, musical instruments, arms and armor, and a contemporary show — all in a single visit. Few cities let you meet civilizations separated by centuries and continents within a few rooms of each other.

The Museum of Modern Art tells a different story. Founded in 1929 around new art, MoMA helped make modernism a central part of international cultural life, and its reach runs from photography and architecture to design, film, and media. Nearby, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum pairs modern and contemporary art with one of the most recognizable museum buildings in New York, while the Whitney Museum of American Art concentrates on American work from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

But New York’s museum story isn’t only about the famous names. The American Museum of Natural History, founded in 1869, pairs public exhibitions with real scientific research, from fossils and biodiversity to human origins and planetary science. The Met Cloisters in northern Manhattan offers medieval European art and architecture — a world away from the Midtown crowds. The Tenement Museum preserves immigrant and working-family history through everyday lives rather than monumental art. The Museum of Chinese in America connects a national story to Chinatown’s living history, the Museum of Jewish Heritage grounds Jewish history before, during, and after the Holocaust, and the museum at Ellis Island tells immigration on a national scale, in the harbor where millions arrived.

Some museums are the city itself. The New York Transit Museum sits inside a decommissioned subway station in Downtown Brooklyn, turning daily infrastructure into an account of engineering, design, and labor. The Museum of the City of New York examines the city’s past and its changing identity. The New York Historical approaches American history through art, manuscripts, and archives. And across the East River, the Brooklyn Museum proves this culture was never Manhattan’s alone, with collections running from ancient cultures to contemporary art.

The city backs this up with real support. The Department of Cultural Affairs supports more than 1,000 cultural nonprofits, and its Cultural Institutions Group — 39 organizations in city-owned facilities across all five boroughs — traces its roots to the nineteenth century. Programs like Culture Pass give New York City library cardholders access to more than 100 participating institutions.

That’s the real secret. A museum in New York is rarely just somewhere to look at objects. It’s a record of a neighborhood, an archive of migration, a working research center, a preserved piece of infrastructure — or five thousand years of art under one roof. Together, they give the city the deepest and most varied cultural landscape in the world.

If you’re planning your next New York day out, we’ve recently covered why World Animal Day means so much to animal lovers everywhere and the return of the Rockettes Christmas Spectacular to Radio City — two more reasons to get out and explore the city this season.

Originally published on Times Square Chronicles.