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The Cloisters

1938 establishments in New York CityArt museums and galleries in New York CityArt museums established in 1938Buildings and structures on the National Register of Historic Places in ManhattanEuropean medieval architecture in the United States
Funerary artHistoric district contributing propertiesInstitutions founded by the Rockefeller familyMedieval artMetropolitan Museum of ArtMuseums in ManhattanNew York City Designated Landmarks in ManhattanRelocated buildings and structures in New York CitySculpture gardens, trails and parks in New York (state)Use American English from May 2016Use mdy dates from August 2018Washington Heights, Manhattan
The Met Cloisters
The Met Cloisters

The Cloisters, also known as the Met Cloisters, is a museum in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan, New York City. The museum, situated in Fort Tryon Park, specializes in European medieval art and architecture, with a focus on the Romanesque and Gothic periods. Governed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it contains a large collection of medieval artworks shown in the architectural settings of French monasteries and abbeys. Its buildings are centered around four cloisters—the Cuxa, Saint-Guilhem, Bonnefont and Trie—that were acquired by American sculptor and art dealer George Grey Barnard in France before 1913, and moved to New York. Barnard's collection was bought for the museum by financier and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Other major sources of objects were the collections of J. P. Morgan and Joseph Brummer. The museum's building was designed by the architect Charles Collens, on a site on a steep hill, with upper and lower levels. It contains medieval gardens and a series of chapels and themed galleries, including the Romanesque, Fuentidueña, Unicorn, Spanish, and Gothic rooms. The design, layout, and ambiance of the building are intended to evoke a sense of medieval European monastic life. It holds about 5,000 works of art and architecture, all European and mostly dating from the Byzantine to the early Renaissance periods, mainly during the 12th through 15th centuries. The varied objects include stone and wood sculptures, tapestries, illuminated manuscripts and panel paintings, of which the best known include the c. 1422 Early Netherlandish Mérode Altarpiece and the c. 1495–1505 Flemish Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries. Rockefeller purchased the museum site in Washington Heights in 1930 and donated it to the Metropolitan in 1931. Upon its opening on May 10, 1938, the Cloisters was described as a collection "shown informally in a picturesque setting, which stimulates imagination and creates a receptive mood for enjoyment".

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article The Cloisters (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

The Cloisters
West Terrace, New York Manhattan

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N 40.8648 ° E -73.9319 °
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Cuxa Cloister

West Terrace
10034 New York, Manhattan
New York, United States
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The Met Cloisters
The Met Cloisters
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Fort George (New York)
Fort George (New York)

Fort George was the name of five forts in what is now the state of New York.The first Fort George was built in 1626 in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam and named Fort Amsterdam. The British Army renamed it Fort James in 1664. It was briefly reoccupied by the Dutch from 1673 to 1674 as Fort Willem Hendrick. The British renamed it Fort William Henry in 1691, Fort Anne or Queen's Fort in 1703, and finally Fort George in 1714. The north side bastions and ramparts were destroyed in the American Revolutionary War in 1776 by the Americans and finally demolished in 1790. The site is now the location of the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House in Lower Manhattan. A second Fort George was built by the British in 1755 at Oswego, New York, but it was destroyed by the French commander Louis-Joseph de Montcalm in 1756. The site is now Montcalm Park, bordered by West Schulyer Street, Montcalm Street and West 6th Street.A third Fort George was built in Lake George, New York, in 1755. It was destroyed in 1777 and abandoned in 1780. It was located southeast of Fort William Henry facing Lake George, in the wooded area within Lake George Battlefield Park.A fourth Fort George was an encampment built on Staten Island around 1777 in the area of St. George, Staten Island, likely Fort Hill.The last Fort George was built in 1776 in New York City on Fort George Hill, near the current intersection of Audubon Avenue and West 192nd Street in Upper Manhattan. Briefly named Fort Clinton and finally Fort George, from 1895 to 1914 it was the site of the Fort George Amusement Park and is now the location of George Washington Educational Campus and part of Highbridge Park. Fort George Hill is also the name of a present-day street in the area. The neighborhood surrounding the hill is called Fort George and is considered a subneighborhood of Washington Heights. It is generally agreed to run from West 181st Street to Dyckman Street east of Broadway to the Harlem River.

Fort Tryon Park
Fort Tryon Park

Fort Tryon Park is a public park located in the Hudson Heights and Inwood neighborhoods of the borough of Manhattan in New York City. The 67-acre (27 ha) park is situated on a ridge in Upper Manhattan, close to the Hudson River to the west. It extends mostly from 192nd Street in the south to Riverside Drive in the north, and from Broadway in the east to the Henry Hudson Parkway in the west. The main entrance to the park is at Margaret Corbin Circle, at the intersection of Fort Washington Avenue and Cabrini Boulevard. The area was known by the local Lenape tribe as Chquaesgeck and by Dutch settlers as Lange Bergh (Long Hill). During the American Revolutionary War, the Battle of Fort Washington was fought at the site of the park on November 16, 1776. The area remained sparsely populated during the 19th century, but by the turn of the 20th century, it was the location of large country estates. Beginning in January 1917, philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, Jr., bought up the "Tryon Hall" estate of Chicago industrialist C. K. G. Billings and several others to create Fort Tryon Park. He engaged the Olmsted Brothers firm to design the park and hired James W. Dawson to create the planting plan. Rockefeller gave the land to the city in 1931, after two prior attempts to do so were unsuccessful, and the park was completed in 1935. Rockefeller also bought sculptor George Gray Barnard's collection of medieval art and gave it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which from 1935 to 1939 built the Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park to house the collection. The park is built on a high formation of Manhattan schist with igneous intrusions and glacial striations from the last ice age. The park's design included extensive plantings of various flora in the park's many gardens, including the Heather Garden, which was restored in the 1980s. Besides the gardens and the Cloisters, the park has extensive walking paths and meadows, with views of the Hudson and Harlem Rivers. Fort Tryon Park was added to the National Register of Historic Places on December 19, 1978 and was designated a New York City Scenic Landmark in 1983.

St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Shrine
St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Shrine

The St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Shrine is located at 701 Fort Washington Avenue between Fort Tryon Park and West 190th Street, with a facade on Cabrini Boulevard, in the Hudson Heights neighborhood of Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan, New York City. It is dedicated to Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini (Mother Cabrini, 1850–1917), who in 1946 became the first American citizen to be canonized by the Roman Catholic Church.In 1933, as Mother Cabrini's cause for sainthood accelerated, her body was exhumed from a rural grave and transferred to the chapel of Manhattan's Mother Cabrini High School, now the Success Academy Washington Heights elementary school. In 1959, the body was transferred again to the current shrine, built adjoining the school in 1957–1960 to accommodate larger numbers of pilgrims. She rests in a bronze-and-glass reliquary casket in the shrine's altar, covered with her religious habit and a sculpted face mask and hands for more-lifelike viewing. (A widely quoted New York Times article in 1999 misreported that "her remains are kept in a bronze urn nearby", but the newspaper published a more-accurate description in 2015.)The shrine was designed by the architectural firm of De Sina & Pellegrino as a horizontal parabolic arch. It includes prominent stained glass and a bright mosaic mural depicting Cabrini's life, and personal mementos including her horse carriage.The shrine is home to a pipe organ built by the Tamburini Organ Company of Crema, Lombardy, which features 2 manuals, 27 stops, 29 ranks, and 1,747 pipes. This and a similar organ in Chicago's Cabrini shrine are rare instruments in the United States by this noted Italian organbuilder from the region of Cabrini's birth.The street to the west of the New York shrine was renamed Cabrini Boulevard in honor of her beatification in 1938, and the adjacent section of Fort Tryon Park was designated the "Cabrini Woods Nature Sanctuary" after improvements in 2015–2016.