Routes worth the drive

The oldest and largest state museum in the U.S., with a full 9/11 recovery gallery and a working antique carousel on the fourth floor.

The last WWII destroyer escort still afloat in the U.S., restored to her 1945 configuration and toured by veteran-led guides.

A château-style capitol that took 32 years and $25 million to build in the 1800s, with hand-carved staircases that stopped only when the money ran out.

Nelson Rockefeller's marble-and-modernism dream: a 98-acre government plaza with one of the largest state-owned modern art collections in the U.S.

The only museum in the U.S. dedicated to the Irish American story, moved from the Catskills to downtown Albany in 2012.

Founded in 1791, it holds the country's best collection of Hudson River School paintings and two Egyptian mummies that have lived in Albany since 1909.

The 1761 Georgian home of Revolutionary War General Philip Schuyler — where Alexander Hamilton married Eliza in 1780.

An 1798 Federal-style home built for Revolutionary War General Abraham Ten Broeck, hidden in Arbor Hill with a wine cellar that yielded 100-year-old madeira in 1972.

A 1787 farmhouse lived in by five generations of the Van Rensselaer-Rankin family, with 70,000 original objects still in the house — the largest single-family collection in New York.