My reasons for traveling abroad include to visit big, unique museums so that I can examine that which a culture chooses to display in order to reveal itself — its wealth, its history, its ‘state of itself’.

For Europeans or Asians to visit the Met Museum of Art and get a sense of that is problematic because so much of what the museum displays is of European and Asian origin. Why come here to see less of what is there?

There is more than one answer to that question, but something the museum does display that is rarely seen abroad (that I know of) is American ‘industrial and architectural’ art.

Such is the pair of staircases from the Chicago Stock Exchange building by D. Adler and the much more famous Louis Sullivan. Of course, in the American fashion, that building was demolished in 1972 to make way for something bolder and more brash. The sense of the past is sometimes less important than the sense of an even more prosperous future.

In fact, this building was among the first of the great American skyscrapers.

You’ll find very little of this type of artifact in museums outside this country.

The Bayard Building, at 65 Bleecker Street, is the only work of architect Louis Sullivan in New York City.

On March 1, 2018, the Met instituted a $25 mandatory fee for patrons who do not reside in New York State. The ticket covers the Met (Fifth Avenue), the Met Breuer and the Cloisters.