| Edification value |  |
|---|---|
| Entertainment value |  |
| Should you go? | |
| Time spent | 55 minutes |
| Best thing I saw or learned | Jacob Dyckman was the first in his family to go to college, earning a degree from Columbia in 1806. They have his diploma on display in the parlor. Always nice to meet a fellow Columbia man. |
The Dyckman Farmhouse is the least fancy historic home I’ve been to so far on this project. Owned by the Dyckman family, who had a large farm at the northern tip of Manhattan, the house is reckoned to have been built around 1783, so it’s also the oldest historic house I’ve been to yet.
The Dyckmans owned it for over 100 years, though they didn’t always live there; for a while they rented it, and it served as an inn for a bit too. As the subway was rolling north and Inwood was urbanizing, descendants of the Dyckmans decided the house should be preserved as a museum. It opened to the public in 1916.
It’s totally different from the fancy, symmetrical, Federal style of the other historic houses I’ve seen so far. Rather it is very basic, 2 stories plus a cellar, simple, small, cozy, and a little threadbare. And like all old houses, seemingly quite crowded and uncomfortable back in the day.
It’s hard to imagine the original surroundings of the house. They built it deliberately close to what was then the Kingsbridge Road (now Broadway). But mentally erasing the 
apartment buildings, cars, and buses and putting in rolling fields and outbuildings is hard. There’s a tiny plot of green in back and on the sides of the house, with a reconstructed Hessian hut, but it barely begins to evoke the original agrarian setting.
This would be a great opportunity for some augmented reality, though I get the sense that the Dyckman Farmhouse budget probably wouldn’t allow for anything that high tech.
I didn’t go on a tour, just walked around the house on my own, and I definitely missed the value of a good guide, who I think would’ve conveyed a better sense of the people who lived there than I got from the room descriptions alone.
I asked about Hamilton, of course, and to my surprise the answer was they’re not aware of any connections with the great man. However, George Washington likely visited the farm at some point. That said, it would be easy and instructive to combine a visit to Dyckman Farm with the Hamilton Grange, providing a contrast of styles between a working farm and a stately country retreat.
For Reference:
| Address | 4881 Broadway, Manhattan (at 204th St.) |
|---|---|
| Website | dyckmanfarmhouse.org |
| Cost | Free/Donation |
The Elevateds were built in the late 1890s and much of the signage was done in beautiful glass with floral decorations. I think of them as just big and hulking, but they must have been rather beautiful as well.
New York’s main Transit Museum is in Brooklyn, and it is very worth visiting. When they restored Grand Central in the early 2000s, they opened a tiny branch (or “gallery annex”) of the museum there. I’m tempted to say skip it — the exhibit space is very small, it’s more gift shop than museum, and there’s so much else to see at Grand Central.
This year, the transit system is celebrating the construction of the new Second Avenue Subway. In a brilliant bit of counter-programming, the current show at the Transit Museum’s GCT branch is about a bit of deconstructing, showing photos of the dismantling of the Third Avenue Elevated in 1955.
I have a problem with the idea of “folk art.” In my mind, it always translates as “art that’s just not very good.” The naive stuff, the outsider stuff, the untrained stuff, the stuff made by people not right in the head…always it feels to me like there’s some qualifier that attaches to the creator or the work that sets your expectations lower. And for me art is all about high expectations. I know there’s a 
Visiting Gracie Mansion for this project made me realize I knew nothing about Gracie Mansion, beyond the name.
I was just 
Here’s another place that I had no idea existed before starting this project. The Society of Illustrators occupies a very handsome townhouse on East 63rd Street, and includes an ample museum space (and even a gift shop!) for showing off the work of illustrators of all kinds.
The museum is terrific, although given that it is a townhouse, there are some stairs to navigate — fair warning if you’re movement impaired.
The Czech Center’s museum space is small but effective, and it comes associated with three things that no cultural institution I’ve seen thus far can match:
Gary Simmons’s “Ghost Reels,” an installation in the stairway featuring the names of black stars of the silent film era, written in the style of a typewriter typeface, and partially blurred or erased, evoking a part of film history that many have forgotten.
The Drawing Center occupies a beautifully designed SoHo space, cast iron Corinthian columns outside, several gallery spaces within. It’s all very clean and spare and modern. Imminently Instagrammable, as they say.
The ground-floor space is great, with large windows looking out onto both Fifth Ave. and 13th Streets. 
The Center for Architecture claims to be “the premier cultural venue for architecture and the built environment in New York City.” I can’t say that I was all that impressed with it. 
The Leslie-Lohman Museum occupies the newest museum space in the city, having moved into spiffy new digs in SoHo in just the last two weeks. 
The new space for the museum is mostly terrific. You enter into a fairly narrow area where two greeters welcome you and point out what’s on. There are two gallery spaces, a smaller one to the left as you walk in , and a larger one to the right and back. There’s also a kitchen space as well. I am torn between thinking it’s charming that there’s a kitchen right sort of in the open, and thinking their architect really should’ve found a way to separate that from the public space.
The inaugural show is sort of a hodge-podge. I get that survey shows do that, and I would be disappointed if they’d segregated the gay art over here, the lesbian art over there, etc. Sorting by chronology or medium can oversimplify, too. But I would’ve appreciated some effort to put a lens on the collection. Love versus sex. Ideals of beauty. Something.
Should you go? It depends on how you feel about diversity and penises. And maybe, even if you are squeamish about either of those two things, you should consider going anyway. It might be good for you.