NYC's best underrated museums for families

This fascinating museum—actually a series of restored tenement apartments at 97 Orchard St—is accessible only by guided tour. Tickets are sold at the visitors’ center at 108 Orchard St; tours often sell out, so it’s wise to book ahead. Costumed “residents” give glimpses into the daily lives of immigrant clans that called the building home over the decades. “Getting By” visits the Sicilian Baldizzi family residence in apartment No. 5 in the 1930s, while “Piecing It Together” pays a call on the Russian Rogarshevsky family, mourning the loss of patriarch Abraham, a garment worker who died of tuberculosis in 1918. “The Moores: An Irish Family in America,” revisits a Dublin family who lived in the building in 1869.

The only institution of its kind in the world, this modest space explores high-rise buildings as objects of design, products of technology, real-estate investments and places of work and residence. Permanent exhibits include handcarved wooden models of Downtown and Midtown Manhattan, as well as maps and photographs, a model of the world’s tallest building and information about the twin towers and rebuilding of Ground Zero.

Located in Spanish Harlem (a.k.a. El Barrio), El Museo del Barrio is dedicated to Latino, Caribbean and Latin American art and cultural history. The museum’s 6,500-object collection includes 400 pre-Columbian objects as well as folk art objects and modern, contemporary, abstract and mixed-media artworks.

Surrounded by verdant rows of Swiss chard, eggplant, garlic, beets, amaranth and mesclun, the Wyckoff Farmhouse Museum seems worlds away from its urban perch on Utica Avenue in East Flatbush, Brooklyn. The farm’s 1.5 acres, wedged between two busy roads, are the stuff that the dreams of idealistic urban planners are made of—a lush, green space readily accessible to an inner-city community. But Wyckoff is no idle fantasy. Its farmhouse, which dates to 1652, may be a monument to a bygone way of life, but the organic produce harvested on its grounds has been a vital resource for the neighborhood since 2003, when the farmers’ market was established. Family-friendly events occur throughout the year, and usually focus on seasonal happenings, like an Apple Festival in September.

This Dutch Colonial-style farmhouse-turned-museum was built in 1784 and became a museum in 1916. It is known as the last farmhouse in Manhattan and serves as a window into early Manhattan and Inwood. Families generally spend around 30 or 40 minutes exploring the house and grounds, which is perfect when there are young kids in tow, and since admission is donation-based, this adventure won’t break the bank.

This authentic town and farm with buildings from the 17th, 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries has been preserved and transformed into a living history museum. There are daily tours with a variety of themes (think food, business and communications), but you are also welcome to explore the grounds without a guide.

Comprised of several six-foot-tall museums (the museum’s goal is to eventually have six six-foot tall museums), MICRO Museum condenses some of the world’s most interesting topics into vending machine-sized experiences. Check out the Smallest Mollusk Museum and Perpetual Motion Museum (and confirm the location of each before leaving the house, because they do travel!)

New York City’s only preserved 19th century family home is an elegant, late Federal-Greek Revival house stocked with the same furnishings and decorations that filled its rooms when it was inhabited by hardware tycoon Seabury Treadwell and his descendants from 1835 to 1933.