5. The Dyckman Farmhouse Museum, 4881 Broadway (1784)

A farmhouse in Manhattan seems like something miles outside the realm of possibility, and yet there lies Dyckman farmhouse right on 204th Street, looking down on the rest of Manhattan, and thanks to the efforts of Mary Alice Dyckman Dean and Fannie Fredericka Dyckman Welch, the farmhouse will continue to be a relic of Dutch colonial architecture and life for years to come.

Built in 1784 by William Dyckman, the farmhouse used to be part of an immense 250-acre farm. As Manhattan’s rapid development in the early 1900s started doing away with most of the old colonial homes in the area, it seemed like the Dyckman Farmhouse was heading towards the same fate. Mary and Fannie, however, the two granddaughters of the last Dyckman to grow up in the house, bought the property in 1915 and started a restoration effort that resulted in the museum we see today. Although it’s not the two hundred acres it once was, the farmhouse still has a lovely garden containing a well, a military hut and an actual reproduction of a smokehouse.