The Cloisters Where Manhattan Forgets Its Century

The Cloisters sits at the northern tip of Manhattan in Fort Tryon Park, and getting there requires the A train to 190th Street and a walk through a park that feels nothing like New York — winding paths, stone walls, and views of the Hudson River that look like they were borrowed from the Rhine. The museum itself is a medieval monastery assembled from pieces of five French cloisters, shipped to New York by John D. Rockefeller Jr. in the 1930s and rebuilt on a bluff above the river with the conviction that a city needs at least one place where the 21st century cannot reach.

Inside, the rooms are lit by daylight through Romanesque windows, and the galleries hold the Metropolitan Museum's medieval collection: illuminated manuscripts, ivory carvings, stained glass, and the Unicorn Tapestries — seven panels woven in the late 15th century that tell the story of a unicorn hunt with a detail and a beauty that makes every other tapestry in the world look like a curtain. The colors — the millefleur background of tiny flowers against dark green, the unicorn's white body caught in a wooden fence, the red of pomegranates — are so vivid after 500 years that the dyes seem to have made a pact with time.

The cloisters themselves — open-air courtyards surrounded by arched walkways — are planted with medieval gardens: herbs, fruit trees, and flowers that were cultivated in European monasteries for medicine, cooking, and contemplation. The Cuxa Cloister has pink marble columns from a 12th-century French abbey, and sitting in its garden, listening to the fountain and the birds and nothing else, produces a silence that Manhattan does not normally permit.

What visitors miss: The Treasury in the lowest level holds the smallest and most precious objects — reliquaries, enameled crosses, a tiny book of hours with paintings smaller than a postage stamp and more detailed than most full-sized canvases. The room is dim, the cases are lit from within, and the effect is of looking into a world that took beauty so seriously it made it the size of a prayer.