It started in a so-called brownstone on 53rd Street, a museum founded by three ladies who lunched. It was, as Glenn Lowry writes in an essay published to coincide with the museum’s reopening, separate from the street, pointedly removed, up a set of stairs. This was not a museum that was about ‘accessibility’. It was a museum that was about a particular subculture of the wealthy and connected, until 1939, when J. Alfred Barr, the museum’s first director, commissioned its first proper home, designed by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durrell Stone.