When one thinks of Manhattan, one doesn’t think of farms, but the place was once crawling with them. In the 1920s, they began disappearing, and by 1930, the last had shut down. It would have been located in my neighborhood in the northernmost tip of Manhattan, because, as I’ve learned, the subway system’s creep north at the turn of the century served as a herald for urban development. For a brief point, the farms and the subways would have coexisted and it amuses me to think of emerging from a station in the middle of a field or right next to a nonplussed cow chewing its cud.
There’s still a farmhouse in my neighborhood, the Dyckman Farmhouse, located a few blocks northwest of my apartment, and it’s carefully billed as Manhattan’s sole surviving “Dutch colonial style farmhouse,” but I think it’s safe to say it’s one of the only complete farmhouses still standing here, period.
It was built around 1784 by William Dyckman (who has a main street and two subway stops in my neighborhood named after him) and housed three generations of his family, then was donated to the city and first restored in 1916.
Because I’m an Ohio boy myself, my first question for the volunteer guide inside regarded crops. What kind of farm was this, exactly? Most guide books definitively list the Dyckman Farm’s crops as cherry and apple orchards, but if there’s public-record proof of that, it has yet to be unearthed. While not discounting the romance of a fruit orchard, extant public records suggest the Dyckmans sowed more pedestrian crops of corn and turnips. Whatever the crops, the British burned them down during their occupation from 1776 to 1783.
The farmhouse is downright inviting, snuggled on a half-acre corner on Broadway at West 204th Street, and it’s enough to whisk you away from the not-go-greatness of the urban environs, including the gas station across the street in the front and the brick apartment building visible through the trees in the back. The farmhouse features Dutch doors, white clapboard siding, wooden shingles, and two porches, each running the width of the house’s front and back. I noted the doors to a storm cellar on the one side of the house, and on the south side, there was a summer kitchen; detached from the house, such kitchens were built in pre-air conditioned days to dissipate cooking heat during hot weather.
Inside are relics and furniture from the period. The collection is slim and several rooms remain closed because the place is still under renovations and building upon its collection—it only reopened November 17th after having been closed since 2003 for heavy-duty restorations.
Out back, not exactly serving to downplay the crop uncertainty, is a large black cherry tree. There’s also a garden, a smokehouse, and, incongruously, a small Lincoln Log-style hut, of the sort that Hessians would have camped in during the British occupation.