Whitney Museum of American Art (original building)

The building you see at eight through twelve West Eighth Street began as a row of four townhouses constructed in eighteen thirty-eight. These homes eventually became the first permanent headquarters of the Whitney Museum of American Art in nineteen thirty-one. The museum was born out of rejection when the Metropolitan Museum of Art declined a gift of five hundred artworks offered by the sculptor and heiress Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Rather than letting her collection remain hidden, she transformed these connecting townhouses into a dedicated home for the American artists that traditional institutions frequently ignored.