Snug Harbor Cultural Center & Botanical Garden

This stunning waterfront complex of 28 buildings, a few gardens and several museums is easily the island’s top attraction. Made from a lovely, 19th-century Greek Revival old sailors’ home, it almost saw the wrecking ball until Jackie Onassis and her big sunglasses intervened in 1976. The complex consists of the main ‘Snug Harbor’ site (now affiliated with the Smithsonian), which fills the Main Hall, the central building as you enter from the road. Here you can see temporary exhibits and the excellent Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, home to changing exhibitions of modern art. Behind the front five buildings, you’ll find several attractive gardens, including the super-soothing New York Chinese Scholar’s Garden, built in 1999, which offers a walk through ancient-style pavilions and teahouses with waterfalls running through. You’ll also find the Tuscan Garden, which opened in 2009, containing landscaped terraces, a 1-acre vineyard, an outdoor amphitheatre and a villa with changing exhibitions. The gardens get busiest in April and May when many of the plants bloom. Also on the complex is the independent Noble Maritime Collection, with period-piece reconstructions of sailors’ dorms and other nautical tidbits. You can bus it here or take a (rather grim) two-mile walk along Richmond Terrace west from the ferry terminal pier.