When Madison Avenue was on a par with Fifth as the place to live, Murray Hill came to be dominated by the Morgan family, the crusty old financier J.P. and his offspring, who at one time owned a clutch of property here. The Morgan Library was built for the old crustacean in 1906. A gracious Italian Renaissance-style mansion, it houses one of New York's best small museums.
Originating with Morgan's own impressive collection of manuscripts, the museum has grown to include nearly 10,000 drawings and prints (including works by Rembrandt da Vinci, Degas and Dürer), and an extraordinary array of historical, literary and musical manuscripts. The exhibits change so frequently that it's impossible to catalog what visitors will see - but a copy of the 1455 Gutenberg Bible (the museum owns a magnificent three out of the eleven surviving manuscripts) is always on display. There are also original scores by Mahler, Beethoven, Schubert and Gilbert and Sullivan; the only complete copy of Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur ; and letters from the likes of Vasari, Mozart and George Washington, and the literary manuscripts of Dickens, Jane Austen and Thoreau.
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