Dyckmans in Manhattan
Peter Dyckman Campbell, there are famous stories about his historic name. Well, it’s real history.
The Dyckman Farmhouse Museum is the oldest standing farmhouse in New York City. There are great pictures here. Nearby was once the Dyckman Oval, a Negro League baseball stadium.
Dyckman Street is in the Inwood neighborhood of Manhattan (also the location of the farmhouse and Dyckman Oval) and is the name of a stop of the A train.
Ancestral home of Pete Campbell
Basket of Kisses: The unofficial blog of AMC's Mad Men. Where all the cool kids meet & greet to talk about Don Draper, Janie Bryant, Christina Hendricks, Jon Hamm, Matthew Weiner, & subtexty things.
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May 17th, 2009 at 2:45 am
That's an interesting history. Thanks for including it. I got really excited reading about the Dyckman Oval and it's use as a stadium for the Negro Leagues. Satchel Paige is a not-too-distant relative, and I love getting as much information about him as I can. I imagine he would have played there several times, for any number of teams, the most famous of which would have been the Pittsburgh Crawfords and Kansas City Monarchs.
May 17th, 2009 at 4:37 am
That's a very cool relative to have!
May 17th, 2009 at 9:08 am
My daughter teaches 4th grade in Washington Heights (not far from Inwood), and every year she takes the kids on a field trip to the Dyckman Farm Museum. I got her hooked on Mad Men last fall, and she called me to relate the Dyckman connection.
May 17th, 2009 at 5:58 pm
Interesting! I knew about Dyckman Street, and I recognized the Dutch sound of the name and knew enough about New York's history to fill in the blanks, but I didn't know about the Dyckman Farm Museum until today. Sounds like a field trip!
May 17th, 2009 at 9:26 pm
As the family story goes, on one branch of my father's side we're supposed to be descended from "wealthy" Dutch farmers in New York, before the English owned it.
Guess I should check into whether the name Dyckman comes into it, and I'd be related to Pete.
Although lord knows, none of the status or family money came down to any of our recent generations.
May 18th, 2009 at 7:14 am
Well Judy, Pete's dad did squander it all so no wonder…
I wish I had known about this place when we still lived in Manhattan and I was reading Low Life by Luc Sante.
August 19th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
A couple of clarifications:
1. The Dyckman Farmhouse is actually on Broadway at 204th Street, about four blocks north of Dyckman Street. (Apropos of nothing, at the corner of Broadway and Dyckman there is a grand old apartment building called “The Broadyke.” If anyone out there knows of a better-named building, I’d love to hear about it.)
2. More significantly, while the Dyckman Street and the Dyckman Farmhouse are real, there is no indication at all the the Dyckman’s ever were, or ever became, a “blue-blood” New York family. They were small farmers who most certainly did not, as was claimed in one episode in Season 1, own half of Manhattan at one time. Their descendants were never prominent in the city, as far as I know there are none of them left there anymore. Nevertheless, it’s a great old Knickerbocker name, and the house is way cool and definitely worth a visit.