Quick answer
The Brooklyn Museum is the encyclopedic art museum at 200 Eastern Parkway, built in 1897 by McKim, Mead & White and now New York City's second-largest museum. Its roughly 500,000 objects span 5,000 years, with a famed Egyptian collection and Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party on permanent view.
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A library that outgrew itself
The Brooklyn Museum did not begin as grand marble steps and Egyptian galleries. It began in 1823, when mechanics and shopkeepers founded the Brooklyn Apprentices' Library so young working men could learn after their shifts. That institution grew into the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, and in 1897 the museum moved into its current Beaux-Arts home on Eastern Parkway, designed by the celebrated firm McKim, Mead & White. It was one of the last grand buildings raised before Brooklyn became part of greater New York in 1898. At 560,000 square feet it is the second-largest museum in the city, yet it began as the smallest kind of ambition.
Treasures in an unfinished palace
The grand marble staircase of the original design was never finished, and the building still reads as a work forever in progress — which suits a museum that keeps reinventing itself. Its strength is breadth: about 500,000 objects across galleries of American, European, African, Oceanic, and Asian art. The crown is the Egyptian collection, more than 3,000 years of antiquities that helped make the museum's name. No less famous in a different register is Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, made from 1974 to 1979, a triangular table with 39 place settings for history's famous women and more than 998 names set in the tiles below.
What to do on a stop here
Give the Egyptian wing a solid hour — its mummies and coffins reward the slow look. Then find The Dinner Party in the Sackler Center and walk the full table, reading the names set into the floor at your feet. Wander the American galleries for painters like Edward Hopper and Georgia O'Keeffe, and save the rooftop or the lobby's civic tone for the exit. Come on a first Saturday, when the museum stays open late and the light turns the columns gold. Count the place settings as you pass — each one is a woman somebody decided history could ignore.