The Met Cloisters museum, New York: how to visit

The Met Cloisters is the Metropolitan Museum's second building: a museum of medieval European art on a hilltop in Fort Tryon Park, at the northern end of Manhattan, more than a hundred streets north of the main museum on Fifth Avenue. To get there, take the A train to 190 St and walk about ten minutes through the park, or ride the M4 bus to its last stop. It is closed on Wednesdays and open the other six days, 10 am to 5 pm from March through October and only until 4:30 pm from November through February (hours checked in September 2026). There is no separate ticket: a Met ticket covers both buildings on the same day, and advance booking isn't required.

Inside are about 2,000 works, most of them from the 12th to the 15th century, in a building assembled in the 1930s around pieces of real French and Spanish monasteries, including the room where the seven Unicorn Tapestries hang.

A cloister is the square of covered walkways around an open courtyard at the center of a monastery. The museum takes its name from portions of five medieval cloisters, taken apart in France, shipped to New York and rebuilt here with new masonry around the original columns and capitals. According to the Met's own history page, the building copies no specific medieval structure: the architect Charles Collens and the curators Joseph Breck and James Rorimer designed it as a run of rooms sized to fit the pieces they had. So the walls are often the exhibit. Doorways, windows, a chapter house and a whole church apse are built in, and the tapestries, ivories and manuscripts sit in rooms made around them. The Met calls it America's only museum dedicated exclusively to the art and architecture of the Middle Ages, which is its own claim; we haven't found a reason to doubt it.

If you like old stone, yes. It is a different visit from Fifth Avenue, not a smaller version of it. Fifth Avenue is galleries you walk through; the Cloisters is rooms and courtyards you can sit in. The Cuxa garden has benches, the Bonnefont Cloister looks across the Hudson to the Palisades, and the building is small enough to see without a plan.

It is also much quieter. In its record year, fiscal 2019, the Cloisters counted 325,326 visitors (Met press release, July 2019), a peak the museum credits to the Heavenly Bodies exhibition. Across its three buildings the Met counted "more than 7 million" visitors that year, so fewer than one in twenty went uptown. No Cloisters-only figure has been published since.

Who should probably skip it:

• First-time visitors with one or two days in New York who haven't seen Fifth Avenue. The main building has medieval galleries of its own.
• Anyone who came for paintings. Apart from the Merode Altarpiece and some altarpiece panels, this is stone, glass, tapestry, ivory and books.
• Visitors who need step-free access and can't plan ahead: the museum counts roughly 60 steps from the front door to the ticket desk, and the step-free alternative depends on a shuttle.

Plan around Wednesday: both Met buildings are closed that day. And from November to February the Cloisters closes at 4:30 pm, half an hour before Fifth Avenue.

Through two men and a landscape firm. George Grey Barnard, a sculptor who had studied with Rodin, collected medieval fragments and showed them on Fort Washington Avenue. John D. Rockefeller Jr. paid for the Met to buy that collection, bought the hilltop to the north, had the Olmsted Brothers make it a park, and gave the park to the city while keeping four acres for a new museum. Dates come from the Met's history page, the city's 1974 landmark report and NYC Parks.

About the Palisades, since the short version is everywhere. The Met says Rockefeller gave the land to preserve the view from The Met Cloisters. The Palisades Interstate Park Commission calls that an oft-repeated anecdote and quotes his 1933 letter: his "primary purpose" was to protect the land along the top of the cliffs, as part of a wider conservation and parkway plan. Both can be true, and the cliffs you see from the Bonnefont Cloister are parkland either way.

The Met names them Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa, Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert, Trie-sur-Baïse, Froville, and elements associated with Bonnefont-en-Comminges. Its history page now says those last pieces were "once thought to have come from" Bonnefont, so read the name as a label. None came over whole, and Saint-Guilhem is the only one under a roof.

You enter on the upper level, which the museum calls the first floor. The Bonnefont and Trie cloisters, the Gothic Chapel and the Treasury are one level down, on the ground floor. The numbers are the Met's gallery numbers.

We checked where each of these is shown in the Met's collection database on September 29, 2026. Objects move, so look up anything you care about the week you go.

Seven tapestries tell the hunt of a unicorn, from The Hunters Enter the Woods to the best known, The Unicorn Rests in a Garden, where the animal sits chained inside a fence. The Met dates them 1495-1505, designed in France and woven in the South Netherlands. They were first recorded in Paris in 1680, and Rockefeller gave them to the museum in 1937 (the seventh survives as two fragments, given in 1938). Take your time: the plants in the backgrounds can be identified, and many of them grow one floor down in the Trie Cloister.

The Annunciation Triptych, known as the Merode Altarpiece, is a small oil on oak of about 1427-32 that puts the Annunciation in a Flemish living room, with Joseph making mousetraps in the right wing. The Met now catalogs it as workshop of Robert Campin, so guidebooks that call it simply Campin's are a step behind. On the museum's map the room is the Merode Room.

A walrus-ivory cross of about 1150-60, covered in small carved figures and inscriptions. The Met calls it British and "attributed by some" to the abbey of Bury St Edmunds. Keep the hedge: the origin is argued over. It is in the Treasury on the ground floor.

Two famous prayer books share the Treasury: the Belles Heures of Jean de France, duc de Berry, painted by the Limbourg brothers in 1405-1408/09, and the tiny Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux by Jean Pucelle, about 1324-28. A book shows one spread at a time, and manuscripts are usually rotated off display to rest them from light. Both were listed on view in gallery 013 on September 29, 2026; that can change month to month. Also look for the Cloisters Playing Cards, and the enamelled Beaker with Apes in gallery 014. The museum's free audio guide, on its website, has a Cloisters highlights playlist: bring headphones.

As of September 2026, the museum lists:

• March 1 to October 31: Thursday to Tuesday, 10 am to 5 pm.
• November 1 to the end of February: Thursday to Tuesday, 10 am to 4:30 pm.
• Closed: Wednesdays, Thanksgiving Day, December 25 and January 1.

One difference catches people out. Fifth Avenue closes on the first Monday in May for the Met Gala; the Cloisters' hours list no such closure, so that day it is the Met building you can visit. Fifth Avenue also stays open to 9 pm on Fridays and Saturdays. The Cloisters has no late night.

Tickets are shared: "All tickets include exhibitions and same-day entry to both Met locations for the date printed on your ticket." Most visitors pay the full adult price; pay-what-you-wish is open only to New York State residents and to students in the tri-state area (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut), and children 12 and under go free (details on our admission page). None of the tour operators we list sells a Cloisters visit, and outside guides must register with the museum, so for most people the audio guide is the guide.

The address is 99 Margaret Corbin Drive, inside Fort Tryon Park. Train and bus times below are our daytime medians from the MTA's published timetables for fall 2026; they leave out waiting and traffic.

Two things save time. Not every northbound M4 goes to the Cloisters: some are signed for Cabrini Boulevard, so read the sign. And the 1 train, which also runs up here, stops at 191 St, about 1.1 km from the museum in a straight line against 700 m from the A's 190 St; the museum doesn't send visitors that way. Routes to Fifth Avenue itself are on our getting-there page.

Partly, with planning. The museum says access is "somewhat limited" because of the building's landmark status: cobblestones on the approach and about 60 stairs from the main (Postern) entrance to the admissions desk. Its Cloisters accessibility guide lists the alternatives:

• A free shuttle to a step-free entrance, picked up near the main entrance.
• Car drop-off at the step-free courtyard entrance (clearance 10 ft 6 in high, 9 ft wide) and two spaces for disabled permit holders.
• An elevator: ask a security officer.
• Free wheelchairs, first come, first served, and stools, at the desk in the Main Hall.

Use the A to 181 St and the M4, not 190 St. Questions: [email protected] or 212-731-1127 during opening hours. Strollers face the same limits. More on our accessibility page.

Yes, and the same-day ticket allows it, but it is a long day: about an hour between the two buildings by subway, closer to an hour and a half on the M4. It suits people who have already seen Fifth Avenue, or who have three or more days in New York and want medieval art. It doesn't suit a first visit with children, or anyone who wants a proper look at Fifth Avenue's big collections.

A sequence that works, Cloisters first:

1. About 9:30, A train from Midtown to 190 St, then the walk up. In at 10 am.
2. 10:00 to 12:30 at the Cloisters: enough for the main rooms and the gardens.
3. Lunch at the seasonal café in the Trie Cloister or on the way. Outside food isn't allowed inside (water in a closed bottle is).
4. Back down: the M4 if you'd rather sit than change, the subway and the M79 if you want speed.
5. Fifth Avenue from about 2:30 until 5 pm, or until 9 pm on a Friday or Saturday.

Why this order: the Cloisters closes first, and its gardens want daylight. Done the other way round, leave Fifth Avenue by 2 pm in winter to get a useful stretch uptown before the 4:30 pm closing. Never on a Wednesday, and not on Met Gala Monday, when Fifth Avenue is shut. Longer plans are in our itineraries around the museum.

The museum sits in Fort Tryon Park, 67 acres according to NYC Parks, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., son of the co-designer of Central Park. Its Heather Garden, open since 1935, is in the city's words its largest garden with unrestricted public access: a 600-foot promenade with more than 500 kinds of plants, free, at the park's southern end near the 190 St station. Paths on the western edge look across the Hudson to the Palisades, and the drive up is named for Margaret Corbin, who took over her fallen husband's cannon when the British attacked this hill in 1776. In good weather the walk is part of the visit; in rain, take the M4 the last stop.