5. The American Wing was Once a Freestanding Building

A gold statue stands at the center of the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The neoclassical façade of the American Wing, curiously built into the wall of Engelhard Court (Gallery 700), was actually a freestanding building facing an exterior garden for fifty years. It was enclosed in 1980. The facade was rescued from the Branch Bank of the United States, located on Wall Street, before that building’s demolition in the 1920s.

The two Beaux-Arts bronze lampposts that stand in Engelhard Court once flanked the Bank façade. These were the original lampposts Richard Morris Hunt designed for the Met entrance. They are strategically placed in the Court, highlighting the ambiguity between nineteenth-century American art and its European influences. Another secret of the American Wing is that Englehard Court was once an openair courtyard. One of the design principles shared by the original and subsequent designers of the Museum–Vaux and Mould, Richard Morris Hunt, and McKim Mead and White–was to use courtyards to provide natural light. Over time these have all been filled in. With the advent of and preference for electric lighting and air conditioning, it was “no longer necessary to have interior courtyards [to] serve as light wells and air shafts.” [Heckscher]