Clebrity Night Shot

New York has a bounty of world-class attractions in many categories. The city's museums are at the top of that list in terms of quality and diversity. When I lived in Manhattan in the 1980's, I was on a mission to visit every museum in town.

My favorite New York museums are:

• Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the greatest museums in the world. It's mammoth-32 acres-and features a huge variety of art-3.5 million pieces in all. You will have time to see but a fraction of what's here so you might want to pick a style, a country or a century and start there. Some of the most popular exhibits include the Rembrandt paintings, Roman statues, Tiffany glass and the reconstructed Temple of Dendur in the Egyptian wing. You'll quickly realize why the "Met" attracts 5 million visitors a year.

• American Museum of Natural History sits across the park from the Met on Central Park West. Dinosaur fossils are a big attraction here, with such stars as Tyrannosaurus Rex, Apatosaurus (formerly Brontosaurus), Stegosaurus and Triceratops. The dazzling Rose Center for Earth and Space is the new home of the famous Hayden Planetarium. The Center is a glass cube, and the Planetarium is in a sphere within the cube. The Rose Center is an interactive resource encompassing all things pertaining to galaxies, stars and planets.

• Museum of Modern Art is a fun place, right in the heart of Midtown. The building itself is dramatic, with a breathtaking 6-story glass atrium that looks out over a sculpture garden. The modern art featured here exists in many media forms-paintings, photographs, sculptures, films, drawing, architecture and design. A lot of familiar 20th-century works hang on MOMA's walls.

• Ellis Island Museum is sometimes off the radar of tourists, but it's a great one. The museum chronicles the role of Ellis Island in immigration history; the island was where 12 million immigrants were processed-examined, quarantined and sometimes even renamed-from 1892 to 1954. Probably the museum's most popular exhibit is the American Immigrant Wall of Honor, which recognizes America's immigrants and is inscribed with over 700,000 names.

• Guggenheim Museum is more known for its architecture than for its art, which is actually well worth seeing. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the museum has an upward-spiraling ramp that winds 6 floors high. Art pieces hang from the walls surrounding the ramp, and each set of pieces leads an exhibit that continues in an adjacent chamber. Celebrated European artists who include Picasso, Kandinsky, Chagall, Renoir and others are prevalent in the Guggenheim's permanent collections.

• Lower East Side Tenement Museum offers a rare look at a New York City tenement, or multiple-family building, that was the first home to U.S. immigrants. Most of these tenements had no water, heat or toilets until 1905. The building was rediscovered in 1988 by historian Ruth Abram, who wanted to build a museum to honor America's immigrants. The first restored apartment, that had been the 1878 home of the German-Jewish Gumpertz family, opened in 1992. The museum can be seen by guided tour only.