Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

The story

Unlike every other Smithsonian museum in the country, this one charges admission. It began in 1895 when three granddaughters of Peter Cooper—Sarah, Eleanor, and Amy—approached Cooper Union with an unusual request: space for a Museum for the Arts of Decoration, modeled on the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. They wanted designers to have somewhere to study. That impulse found its permanent home in Andrew Carnegie's mansion on Museum Mile, where collections tracing American design and creativity still draw the curious and the working designer alike.