"I love it and it disgusts me at the same time," she said. "It's like a cleaning fantasy."

The Morgan Library has spent the summer, and $4.5 million, tidying up old man Pierpont's library and office in an effort to return this petite American Renaissance gem to the grandeur of 1906. The new space opens next month, but a slate of big-name exhibitions that invoke, surprisingly, the 20th century and the museum's own founder lead up to it. (The robber baron's reputation has gotten some polishing up, too.) But will the restored Beaux-Arts mansion prove enough of a draw to offset the museum's recent dip in attendance? "I certainly hope so," said the curator, adding, "Our trustees certainly hope so." The Morgan Library is something of a serial renovator. This is the fifth major renovation since the museum first acquired Morgan's 37th Street townhouse in 1989. Most recently, in 2006, a $109 million Renzo Piano design united the museum's separate buildings, adding a soaring, sun-drenched atrium. The resulting architectural ballyhoo spiked annual attendance to 223,000. Now, attendance has fallen back to around 150,000--little more than the museum drew in 2002.  

Produced by Amir Shoucri

The goal of the 20 years of on-again, off-again renovations and expansions has been to transform the Morgan from a jumble of separate buildings filled with jaw-dropping curios to a major New York cultural institution. But the results have been a series of functional spaces (a theater, vaults, a cafe) that have more in common with the whitewashed walls of MoMA than the cozy nooks that bookworms demand. "The one thing we really did sacrifice in building all these new spaces was the intimacy of the old library," said Ms. Tonkovich.

"It's a challenging campus," noted Morgan director William Griswold, and this renovation, which opens to the public in late October, "will better integrate the Renzo Piano expansion with our present buildings." He added: "My highest hope is that it will make the Morgan ever more visible, and that our visitors ... will come to be more familiar with the nature and caliber of the Morgan's collections."

Part of the Morgan's "problem" is that the permanent collection is spectacular, but not traditionally visual. The Morgan owns three Gutenberg bibles, Mozart and Chopin manuscripts, the sole surviving manuscript of Milton's Paradise Lost, Dickens' manuscript of A Christmas Carol, Thoreau's journals and Jefferson's letters to his daughter Martha, among many other treasures. The Morgan augments those holdings with more traditional art-museum exhibitions-shows of Edgar Degas' sketchbooks (the library's own) and Roy Lichtenstein's black-and-white drawings (largely on loan) open Sept. 24-but its own collection is largely of the scholarly variety.  

Once finished, the gussied-up McKim will offer something that the Morgan's rare books and manuscripts lack: eye candy. "I think there's a place for minimalist elegance and I think there's a place for opulence," said the curator. "We don't have to pick from three different shades of off-white for something. We can use color." To see a Renzo Piano, one need only check out The New York Times' headquarters on Eighth Avenue. To enjoy a Charles McKim (or a McKim, Mead & White building, to use the full name of the architecture firm that was a superstar at the turn of the century) requires membership at the University or Metropolitan Clubs, or a room at the soon-to-be-razed Hotel Pennsylvania. "As more and more of old New York disappears," she said, "I think we cling more tightly to places that are still left."

Just as they are revitalizing Mr. Morgan's library, the curators are making more of an effort to tell the financier's story. Morgan was a late 19th-century merger king who created both General Electric and U.S. Steel, and had something of a monopoly on the nation's railroads. Although he is generally lumped in with the robber barons, the museum's new audio guide paints a sympathetic picture of Morgan the art nut: a founder of the American Museum of Natural History, and with a collection that provided the foundation for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Frick Collection. Without Morgan, said Ms. Tonkovich, "New York would have been a very different town, and the museums would be much poorer."

Two shows opening this month will touch on Morgan's life. One, a showcase of Mark Twain artifacts, opening Sept. 17, includes a Pudd'nhead Wilson manuscript that Twain sold to Morgan, a fan himself. The other, "Anne Morgan's War," showcases Morgan's daughter and her relief efforts in France after World War I. As a collection of photography, letters and early silent film, it is a compelling depiction of Europe ravaged by war, but more than that, it is a celebration, and celebritization, of the name on the front door.  

As for the McKim, even more than a month before completion, the improvement is vast. Before, the marble was dirty, the carpets tatty and the chandeliers unfortunate. Bad lighting meant there were no display cases, and without anything to look at, one left the bite-size villa almost before entering it. Visitors, even those anxious for a glimpse of the Gilded Age, tended to wander in and out without being sure what they had just seen. The architect Samuel White, great-grandson of McKim's partner Stanford White--who was publicly murdered the year the Morgan was finished--compared the East Room's "greenish light" to a morgue.

"I'm really expecting big things out of this," he said. "[The McKim] is like the aria in a Wagnerian opera. You practically want to kill yourself, it's so beautiful in every respect."

The lighting has been softened, the rugs replaced, the reflective plexiglass in the bookshelves traded for one that can actually be seen through. The fireplace and medieval tapestry in the East Room--the library--will be lit, saving them from becoming what Ms. Tonkovich called "a black hole." For the first time, visitors will be able to poke around the North Room--which was the museum director's office until the 1980s-and in the massive vault in Morgan's office. Mr. White called the improvements "astonishing."

Best of all, the revamped McKim will be a home for the permanent collection, allowing for a rotating display of objects like a love letter from a 15-year-old Queen Elizabeth I: fragile gems that are easily swallowed by a spacious gallery.

The collection is, in part, about "the history of the human imagination, and the intimacy of those works is part of their appeal," said Mr. Griswold. "It's incumbent on us to present those materials in a very exciting way."

Intellectuals, unite. This fall, the ideas and ideologies will be flying at New York museums. Here's a look at some of the more important, or interesting, lectures and readings coming up.

The Morgan Library & Museum

Reading Mark Twain

Tuesday, Sept. 28, 2010, 6:30 p.m.

$30 for non-members

As part of its commemoration of the 100th anniversary of Mark Twain's death, the Morgan Library presents three writers who have, in their own way, aspired to Twainness. Toni Morrison represents the serious novelist, Frank Rich the social critic and Fran Lebowitz the literary gadfly. Put them all together, and you'll have a nice facsimile of the great man himself--excepting the mustache, of course. Ten points to any wag who can make them discuss Twain's celebrated speech, "Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism," a favorite of 14-year-old boys.

www.themorgan.org

New Museum

Gysin's Ghost: Poetry Marathon

Saturday, Sept. 25, 1 p.m.

Free with museum admission

In September, the New Museum hosts a day long poetry reading--an event whose oh-so-downtownness is meant to be in keeping with the current exhibition: a retrospective of the works of Brion Gysin, heppest of the hep beats. His most striking piece on display is the Dream Machine, whose flickering lights are meant to be viewed with one's eyes shut. As poets Kenneth Goldsmith, Bernadette Mayer and Anne Waldman read, feel free to leave your eyes closed and imagine.

www.newmuseum.org

The Museum of
the City of New York

Who Broke
New York?

Wednesday, Sept. 15, 6:30 p.m.

$12 for non-members,
reservations required

There was a moment when everyone liked John Lindsay. Lanky, handsome, with the amiable patrician cluelessness of a Gary Cooper character, his mayoralty was undone by a snowstorm and looked even sillier in retrospect, as his policies ushered the city into fiscal quicksand. But though it's tempting to blame the WASP, 1975 was not wholly Lindsay's fault. The Museum of the City of New York, as part of an ongoing attempt to rehabilitate the tall man's legacy, discusses.
www.mcny.org

The Frick Collection

Drawings by Ribera, Murillo, Goya, and Their Contemporaries in North
American Collections

Wednesday, Oct. 6, 6 p.m.

Free

In October, the Frick shows off a bevy of drawings by the Spanish Old Masters, many of them now in U.S. collections. Iberian art was first imported en masse by the nation's kindliest plutocrats-J.P. Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt, particularly-but after the pesky Spanish Civil War, it became much trickier to export. This lecture tells how museums and collectors managed to get Franco to let go of his Goya.

www.frick.org

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Celebrating the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela

Friday, Oct. 1 and 29, 6 p.m.

Free with museum admission

The spectacular Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela has been attracting long lines since the ninth century. Traveling mostly by foot, pilgrims came from as far as Eastern Europe to pay penance in front of the remains of St. James, one of the 12 apostles. To mimic the experience in microcosm, try walking to the Metropolitan Museum on a Friday night to learn about the industries--artistic and commercial--that sprang up on the road to the shrine. Dubbed "The Way of St. James," it has drawn believers to the Holy City of Galicia, Spain, for a thousand years.

www.metmuseum.org

Japan Society

Mark Epstein & Lewis Hyde: Mindful Living

Wednesday, Oct. 13, 6:30 p.m.

$20

No matter what he claimed, that way enlightened dude who lived in the dorm room next to yours was not the first to ask, "What's the sound of one hand clapping?" He should have credited Hakuin Ekaku, an 18th-century Zen master who posed the question in painting, as the slightly more tidy query, "What is the sound of one hand?" That painting and dozens more go on display at the Japan Society in October, along with a lecture presented by the adorably named "Tricycle: The Buddhist Review." www.japansociety.org

The Museum of Modern Art

Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement

Monday, Oct. 18, 12:30 p.m.

$5

A highlight this fall of MoMA's smart Brown Bag lunch program is this talk celebrating public architecture projects that seek, in ways big and small, to change the world. Amid fruit cups and paninis. lecturer Margot Weller will talk about how the architects featured in the exhibition became agents for social change simply by designing particularly vibrant houses, schools or community centers. Visitors are permitted to trade snacks, but anyone whose mother packed their lunch will be roundly snickered at.

www.moma.org

Museum eateries are, by and large, airy, pretty, tasty-and exceptionally well air-conditioned. New York boasts many, a handful of which are much less well known for their culinary accomplishments than they deserve to be. Here's a few, along with a look at what's on view before or after the meal.

The Neue Galerie

1048 Fifth Avenue

The Neue Galerie has two impressive cafes, both run by Austrian chef Kurt Gutenbrunner, of Michelin-starred Wallsé fame. Fledermaus, the bigger of the two, is on the lower level and is inspired by an eponymous prewar Viennese Cabaret. Checkered floors and marble walls give an Old World authenticity to the lunch, tea and viennoiserie served. (Try the spaetzle, or the apple strudel, above.) Fledermaus is something of an insider secret, as it lacks the lines of its upstairs, fancier counterpart, Café Sabarsky, but the menu is the same. Hours are noon to 6 p.m Friday, Saturday and Sunday. An Otto Dix exhibit is scheduled to end Aug. 30, but the eateries are open without a museum admittance fee. www.neuegalerie.org

The Morgan Library & Museum

225 Madison Avenue

Midtown chic. The Morgan's cafe is a airy, Minimalist-inspired dining area that looks over the museum's central court. The food is American-style, and the cafe is open Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., though on Friday it's open until 8 p.m. On view through Aug. 29 is an exhibition of works by figures whose work intersects with 19th- and 20th-century Romanticism, including J.M.W. Turner.

www.themorgan.org

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

1000 Fifth Avenue

The Met's American Wing Café (one of several eateries at the institution) sits within a light-filled atrium, flanked by the grand pavilion's sculpture and its Tiffany stained-glass panels. Central Park is also within view. Just down the hall from the cafe are two American Wing treasures: Emanuel Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware; and a spectacular view of the Catskill Mountains, Asher B. Durand's Kindred Spirts, owned by Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton and on loan to the museum. Cafe hours are 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Sunday through Thursday, with a later 8:30 p.m. closing time on Friday and Saturday.  www.metmuseum.org

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

1071 Fifth Avenue

In the New York neighbourhood dubbed Carnegie Hill, Sunday brunch is an institution, and Wright, at the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Guggenheim, is a popular place to have it. At the swanky, brightly colored eatery, the curvilinear walls and counters seem to arc in tandem with the host museum's own. A tony brunch menu (brunch is served every Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.) features gazpacho sorbet, Maine lobster salad and eggs that it promises are "gently cooked." The restaurant (adjacent to the museum) is also open for lunch and dinner most days. On view at the museum through Sept. 7 is a gorgeous show that pairs two Russian Abstract Expressionists: Vasily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich. www.guggenheim.org

The Asia Society

725 Park Avenue

Sunny and serene, this Park Avenue museum's light-infused courtyard, dotted with trees, is a popular luncheon spot, both for its looks and its unique fare. The menu offers a selection of unusually flavored homemade ice teas, plus curries, fish and vegetarian options. The Michelin-starred Garden Court Café is open in the summer from noon to 2 p.m. every day but Monday. (Museum admittance is not required.) The show on at the museum now, through Aug. 15, is "Rivers of Ice," photographs of the glaciers of Himalaya.

www.asiasociety.org

Scandinavia House

58 Park Avenue

A little-known gem. Closer than Ikea and far more tasty, Scandinavia House's Smörgås Chef serves breakfast, lunch and dinner, with separate tea and dessert menus for the hours in between. The first-floor cafe, open to all Monday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., serves Scandinavian delicacies from caviar to gravlax and the much-fêted Swedish meatballs. Scandinavia House's current exhibit on Swedish fashion will run through Aug. 21, and it has an active film program with a dinner-and-a-movie option. www.scandinaviahouse.org

The Museum of Art

& Design

2 Columbus Circle

The swanky eatery, on the top floor of the museum, has floor-to-ceiling windows and a great name: Robert. Lunch, 11:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., can be had at tables overlooking Columbus Circle and Central Park, or on nearby sofas. Evenings, Wednesday through Saturday, a live pianist entertains the diners. (Museum admittance is not required.) At the museum, an exhibition on bespoke bicycles runs through Aug. 15.

www.madmuseum.org

The New Museum

235 Bowery

The New Museum's lobby cafe is called New Food, and is accessible without paying the museum's entry charge. Specializing in sandwiches, salads and artisanal chocolate, it is open Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday, noon to 6 p.m., and Thursday and Friday, noon to 10 p.m. A retrospective of the works of contemporary Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwander will be on display at the museum through Sept. 19.

www.newmuseum.org