N.Y. / REGION | TWO GOOD REASONS

Two Reasons to Visit Inwood: Dyckman Farmhouse Museum and Darling Coffee

By JULIE BESONENJUNE 26, 2015

The Dyckman Farmhouse Museum, at Broadway and 204th Street, reopened June 5.CreditMichelle V. Agins/The New York Times

The confluence of the Harlem and Hudson Rivers shapes a pocket of land at the northernmost tip of Manhattan, a portal to the island’s oldest forest once roamed by Native Americans. In the 1600s, warring Lenapes and Mohawks and a smallpox epidemic cleared the way for a Dutch settler, Jan Dyckman. He exercised his ax skills to sever virgin trees and built a homestead that still beats in the heart of Inwood.

On June 5, THE DYCKMAN FARMHOUSE MUSEUM, at Broadway and 204th Street, reopened after a six-month spruce-up. Dyckman’s descendants bequeathed it to New York City’s parks department 100 years ago. Admission is pay-what-you-wish.

Brick paths wind to a two-story Dutch Colonial farmhouse with a sloped roof, the property veiled by a riot of roses, lavender and wisteria vines. Under a canopy of century-old beech trees in the backyard is an excavated and rebuilt Hessian log hut typical of the 60 or so barracks that housed German mercenaries on the British payroll during the Revolutionary War.

“They were the first apartments in the city,” Don Rice, an Inwood historian, joked. “Hessian soldiers were moving in and out, going off to fight battles, sharing small spaces.”

The patriotic Dyckmans fled their home and cherry and apple orchards during the British occupation (1776-1783), only to find it all in ashes when they returned. The current structure dates to the 1784 rebuilding. Procreating and prospering, the family helped found a library and a school. Little scandal has surfaced on the high-minded Dyckmans, although the family did own at least one slave. Around 1820, a nephew named James Frederick Smith moved in with his maternal grandfather and bachelor uncles. Said to be charming, the boy won them over and in a Dickensian twist changed his name to Isaac Michael Dyckman to inherit the estate.

Nearby is Darling Coffee, known for its pour-overs. CreditMichelle V. Agins/The New York Times

His portrait is among those on display, along with contemporary pieces by Ben-Christo, whose exhibition runs through August. Of Dutch ancestry and an Inwood resident, he weds the two by superimposing vivid images of people he has photographed near the house over transfigurations of museum artifacts, such as the parlor’s antique grandfather clock.

Further helping to unleash the museum from the past is an influx of visitors afflicted with “Mad Men” mania. The show’s snooty Pete “Dykeman” Campbell trumpeted his lineage, leading fans to soak up his aura in the nobly furnished parlor and bedrooms. The museum happily accepts the increased traffic and then debunks the connection.

Inwood Hill Park looks out on the Henry Hudson Bridge. CreditMichelle V. Agins/The New York Times

Someone like Pete Campbell would probably not brag about being from the déclassé-sounding Tubby Hook — what Inwood was called until the mid-1800s. The new name took hold when the Hudson River Railroad opened a station and dignified merchants like the Lord family, of Lord & Taylor, and Isidor Straus, co-owner of Macy’s, kept country retreats there.

The station closed in the late 1800s and most of the wealthy residents sold off their resorts. Inwood went into decline. “The area was taken over by institutions, two for wayward girls and a tuberculosis asylum called the House of Rest for Consumptives, which I can’t imagine was popular with the locals,” said Cole Thompson, who founded the website My Inwood.

Mr. Thompson lives at Park Terrace, a co-op complex built on the site of the grandiose Seaman mansion, in the 19th century mockingly called Seaman’s Folly or Mount Olympus on the Hudson. On Broadway and 216th Street, shrouded behind an auto body shop, is a scale model of the Arc de Triomphe; it was once the entrance to the Seaman estate.

Take a look at it before or after a stop at DARLING COFFEE (4961 Broadway, 212-304-0181), featuring ceremonious pour-overs for coffee obsessives and masterful chocolate layer cake enrobing ganache and chocolate mousse. Other not-too-sweet treats include buttermilk cakes studded with summer fruit, banana bread pudding graced with chocolate-hazelnut spread, and s’more cookies embedded with a miniature chocolate bar. Half of the light-filled cafe is a no-computer zone, so there’s more social interplay than social media networking.

Fortified with caffeine and sugar and armed with a GPS device, visitors to the neighborhood should go on a hunt in the forest of Inwood Hill Park for pre-Columbian Indian caves. Directions to the Inwood Canoe Club, which offers free kayak tours on summer Sundays, are more straightforward. Look for Dyckman Street and head for the water.