Surrounded by concrete and apartment houses, the last farm in Manhattan was a citywide curiosity

In colonial times, almost all of Manhattan was farmland. These farms—with hundreds of acres of vegetables, fruit orchards, and livestock, anchored by a clapboard farmhouse—were slowly given over to the development of the asphalt city. One unusual farm is considered the last holdout. The Benedetto Farm (sometimes spelled Benedeto), founded by an Italian immigrant family in Inwood, gets that honor, with the last tilling of the soil around 1940. But the story of the Benedetto Farm doesn’t follow the narrative of a longtime farm family selling their land and developing it themselves, or getting squeezed out by rapacious speculators amid the northward march of urbanization. For starters, the Benedetto Farm only began operating in 1924. Vincenzo Benedetto apparently wasn’t making enough money from his job delivering ice to apartment buildings from a horse-drawn wagon. So Vincenzo and his wife, Mary, with help from their nine children, became farmers. For $30 a month they rented a two-acre…