Fifth Avenue in Manhattan is where all New York’s leading museums and art galleries are located and one stretch of road is called “Museum Mile”. It makes life easy if you choose your holiday apartment in the Upper East Side to have all the leading museums within a few blocks of each other.

Every year in June, 5th Avenue is closed for the Museum Mile Festival which is a joyous event full of musicians, street entertainers and free access to the museums.

Here are a few of the museums that contribute to Museum Mile:

• El Museo del Barrio is dedicated to exhibiting Latin American art and also works from Puerto Ricans and people of Caribbean origin.

• The Museum of the City of New York has the feel of an old colonial mansion and is one of New York’s most elegant-looking museums. There are five floors of exhibits including areas such as the Rockefeller rooms. The exhibits retell the history of New York and there is a fantastic display of model ships recounting New York’s prominence as a port. One of the most fascinating exhibits is a series of rooms that have been recreated to represent various periods in America’s colonial history.

• The Jewish Museum is the largest Jewish museum in the ‘West’ and it features painting and other items of Jewish art displayed with explanations of its historical context.

• The Cooper-Hewitt / National Design Museum / Smithsonian Institution has phenomenal displays of design and decorative arts housed in an Upper East Side mansion that was owned by Andrew Carnegie.

• The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is situated in a building designed by the architect, Frank Lloyd Wright where there are displays of works by 19th and 20th century artists including Picasso, Chagall and Vincent van Gogh.

• One of New York’s most famous museums has to be the Metropolitan Museum of Art which exhibits art from all media and from a multitude of places and cultures.

Other museums in Museum Mile include the National Academy Museum which exhibits 19th and 20th century American art.

Photo Credit: michelinstar | Since 2006 Holiday Velvet offers apartments in New York and Upper East Side Rentals.