In a city boasting many of the world’s greatest art museums, it’s perhaps easy to overlook the jewel that is the Morgan Library & Museum, which spans more than half a block, between Madison and Park Avenues, in Manhattan's Murray Hill neighborhood. But with a multiyear restoration of the original library building’s exterior finally complete, as well as the just-overhauled Morgan Garden, unveiled last week, there has perhaps never been a better time to visit the former compound of the Gilded Age financier J. Pierpont Morgan. Ironically humble it may be, at least in comparison to the scale and scope of, say, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney, or the Museum of Modern Art, the Morgan is a potent site of culture that, punching above its weight, is in many respects on par with those larger institutions.

Designed by leading 19th-century architect Charles Follen McKim, of the firm McKim, Mead & White (famous for projects including the ​​Brooklyn Museum, structures across Columbia University’s Morningside Heights campus, and a 1903 renovation of the White House), and designated as a museum since 1924, the Morgan is among the finest examples of Neoclassical architecture in the United States. Frescoed ceilings? Check. Stone lionesses flanking the entrance? Yup. Thanks to an immaculately executed 2006 expansion by Pritzker Prize–winning Italian architect Renzo Piano, which integrates the site’s three historic buildings within three new glass-and-steel pavilions, the museum is also a striking juxtaposition of 19th- and 21st-century design, one that’s decidedly made for today, but that also honors—and literally protects—the past.