Things to do in Yonkers

Nature · North Broadway, north-west Yonkers

The surviving core of Samuel Untermyer's 1910s estate — a walled Persian-inspired garden with a mosaic canal, a Temple of Love above a rock garden, and a stone amphitheatre looking across the Hudson to the Palisades.

Local tip: It is free, it is one of the more remarkable gardens in the country, and almost nobody outside Westchester has heard of it. Go in late afternoon and walk down through the Vista steps to the overlook; the light on the Palisades from there is the reason people move to this side of the river.

Nature · Runs the full north–south length of Yonkers

A flat, shaded gravel path laid on top of the 1842 masonry tunnel that carried Croton water to Manhattan — 41 miles of it, threading through back gardens, woodland and the middle of Yonkers.

Local tip: This is the single best free thing in the city and it is invisible from the road. Pick it up near the Hudson River Museum and walk north towards Hastings; you pass the old weir chambers and ventilator towers, and it is entirely flat, which in a city built on hills is worth something.

Culture · Warburton Avenue, Glenwood

Westchester's largest museum: an art collection strong on the Hudson River School, the restored 1876 Glenview mansion attached to it, and a planetarium, all on a bluff directly over the river.

Local tip: The Glenview period rooms are the part people remember — a preserved Gilded Age interior with the river filling every window. Combine it with the Glenwood Metro-North stop, which is a two-minute walk, and you never need to think about parking.

Landmark · Getty Square, downtown

The Saw Mill River spent ninety years in a culvert under downtown Yonkers. Between 2010 and 2012 the city dug it back out, and there is now an open river, a fish ladder and a park where a car park used to be.

Local tip: One of the first and largest urban river daylighting projects in the United States, and the pivot point of everything that has happened downtown since. Come in spring and you can watch alewives climbing the fish ladder in the middle of the city.

Landmark · Getty Square, downtown

A colonial manor house begun in the 1680s and one of the oldest buildings in Westchester — a New York State Historic Site with an extraordinary rococo plaster ceiling and a long, uncomfortable history of the family who built it and the people they enslaved.

Local tip: It sits directly in Getty Square, next to the bus hub, and is genuinely free. The recent reinterpretation is unusually candid about the Philipse family's slaveholding, which makes it a much better visit than a plaque-and-furniture historic house.

Neighborhood · Downtown, at the foot of Main Street

A rebuilt esplanade along the Hudson with restaurants, the Metro-North station and a floating hydroponic farm moored off the pier, looking straight across at the Palisades cliffs.

Local tip: This is the part of Yonkers that has changed most in fifteen years. Walk the pier at sunset — the Palisades are a 150-metre basalt wall on the far bank and the light goes orange against them. The barge itself runs on solar and river water and is worth an hour if you have children.