5. Wave Hill, Bronx
At Wave Hill, guests are treated to a series of distinct and intimate gardens along with sweeping views of the Hudson River and the Palisades across the way. The twenty acres of natural landscapes are composed of gardens and woodland in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx.
Wave Hill has been a public garden since 1965, but it was originally a 19th-century estate that attracted such famous figures as Theodore Roosevelt and Mark Twain. The estate originally belonged to William Lewis Morris, grandnephew of Lewis Morris (a signer of the Declaration of Independence), and later the dilettante New York publisher William Henry Appleton. It was the final owner, George W. Perkins, who donated the estate to the City of New York in the 1960s.