Fodor's Expert Review Morris-Jumel Mansion

During the Revolutionary War, General Washington used this wooden, pillared, 8,500-square-foot house (1765) as his headquarters, and when he visited as president in 1790, he brought along John Quincy Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton. Inside, rooms are furnished with period decorations; upstairs, keep an eye out for the hand-painted wallpaper (original to the house) and a "commode chair," stuck in a corner of the dressing room. Outside, behind the house, is a Colonial-era marker that says it's 11 miles to New York—a reminder of what a small sliver of Manhattan the city was at that time. West of the house is the block-long Sylvan Terrace, a row of crisp two-story clapboard houses built in 1882.