Kips Bay Farmhouse

You are walking toward the site of a piece of history that vanished over one hundred and seventy years ago. The Kips Bay Farmhouse was built in sixteen fifty-five by a Dutch settler named Jacobus Kip. It stood as a grand brick and stone landmark for nearly two centuries, serving as the last remaining farmhouse from the original New Amsterdam era in Manhattan. You can imagine the house once sitting near what is now the intersection of Second Avenue and East Thirty-fifth Street, long before the grid of the city paved over the rolling landscape. Iron numbers were once embedded into the masonry of the house, permanently marking the year the family first broke ground.