The small NYC museums worth the trip

The only museum in the United States devoted entirely to posters, which sounds narrow until you are standing in it. A poster is a piece of design that had to work in three seconds on a wall, competing with traffic, in whatever year it was made — so a room of them is a room of arguments about how to get a stranger's attention. The Soviet ones and the Swiss ones in the same building will rearrange your head a little.

Two floors, an hour and a half if you read the labels. It is the one on this list I would take a design-minded friend to without asking first.

MOCA sits in a Maya Lin building on the edge of Chinatown, and the building does half the work: it is organised around a courtyard the way a Chinese family house would be, so you keep circling back to the middle. The core exhibition covers a century and a half of Chinese life in America, and it does not flinch at the ugly parts of that history.

Go on a day you have time to eat afterwards. You are two minutes from some of the best cheap lunch in the city and it would be a waste not to use that.

Weeksville was one of the largest free Black communities in pre-Civil-War America, founded by people who had bought their own freedom, and most of it is gone. What survives is a short row of wooden houses on the old Hunterfly Road, standing at an angle to the modern street grid because they predate it — which is the detail that gets me every time. The grid arrived later and went around them.

The centre programmes a lot: talks, film nights, music in the yard in warm months. If you only ever see the houses you have seen half of it.

The oldest building in New York State, from around 1652, and New York City's very first designated landmark. It is a low Dutch farmhouse with a working farm around it, sitting in the middle of residential Brooklyn, and the contrast is the point: this is what the whole borough was, and here is one acre of it that never got built over.

Best with kids, and best in growing season, when the farm is actually producing rather than resting.

The only farmhouse left in Manhattan, built around 1784, sitting on a small rise above Broadway with the subway rumbling past. Three dollars. It takes forty minutes.

What I like about Dyckman is that it has stopped pretending to be a quaint colonial diorama — recent programming has been honest about who worked that land and under what conditions, including the people the Dyckmans enslaved. That makes it a better museum than the version I visited a decade ago.

A stone carriage house from 1799 that became a country hotel in 1826, when this address was countryside and Manhattanites came up here to escape the city at Fourteenth Street. It is now surrounded by the Upper East Side and the Queensboro Bridge ramp, which makes it feel like a rock that a river ran around.

Small, guided, and genuinely odd. Worth pairing with the garden if the weather is doing anything at all.

The northern end of Museum Mile, founded in 1969 by Puerto Rican parents and artists who were tired of their children learning nothing about themselves at school. Fifty-odd years later it is the city's flagship for Latino and Latin American art, and its programming calendar — talks, book launches, film — is one of the busiest on this list.

It is across the street from Central Park's northern end. Do the museum, then walk into the park at 110th, which is the quiet half of it.

Yes, the ferry. Yes, it is worth it. The museum sits inside Snug Harbor, a nineteenth-century sailors' retirement complex that is now eighty-three acres of Greek Revival buildings, botanical gardens and a Chinese scholar's garden, and the museum is a proper old-fashioned one: natural history and art in the same institution, cicadas and paintings under one roof.

Make it a whole day, not a stop. The ferry is free, the site is big, and going all that way for ninety minutes is the mistake people make.