The Merchant's House Museum, also known as the Old Merchant's House and the Seabury Tredwell House, is a historic house museum at Fourth Street in the NoHo neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. Built by the hatter Joseph Brewster in 1831 and 1832, the edifice is a four-story building with a Federal-style brick facade and a Greek Revival interior. It was the Tredwell family's residence for almost a century before becoming a museum in 1936. The Merchant's House Museum is the only 19th-century residence in Manhattan with its original exterior and interior intact.
Brewster built the house as a speculative development, selling it in 1835 to the merchant Seabury Tredwell, who lived there with his family and servants. The structure remained in the family until the death of the youngest child, Gertrude, in 1933. George Chapman, a distant relative, purchased the building and transformed it into a museum. Over the next three decades, the museum's operators struggled to obtain funds to restore the deteriorating house. The architect Joseph Roberto completely renovated the building from 1970 to 1980, and the museum underwent further restoration in the early 1990s after the demolition of nearby buildings damaged it. During the 2010s and 2020s, museum officials protested the construction of a nearby hotel because of concerns that the project would further damage the house.
The Merchant's House Museum has a raised basement, a front doorway accessed by a stoop, a slate roof, and a rear garden. The interior consists of a family room and kitchen in the basement; two parlors on the first floor; and bedrooms on the upper floors. There is also a secret passageway that was used to shelter fugitive slaves as part of the Underground Railroad. The museum's collection has over 4,500 items owned by the Tredwell family, including pieces of furniture, clothing, household items, and personal items. The museum also hosts various performances and events, and it operates tours and educational programs. Reviewers have praised both the museum's exhibits and the architecture. The building's facade and interior are New York City designated landmarks, and the building is a National Historic Landmark.
Site The Merchant's House Museum, originally the Seabury Tredwell House, is at Fourth Street in the NoHo neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. It is on the north side of Fourth Street, between Lafayette Street to the west and Bowery to the east. The land lot is rectangular and measures , with a frontage of ; the lot extends back from the street. The current museum was built as one of six identical houses on the same block.
Abutting the museum to the east is a public park named Manuel Plaza. Built atop a construction shaft for New York City Water Tunnel No. 3, it was named in honor of five African-born slaves who received land in the neighborhood from the Dutch West India Company. Farther east, at Fourth Street, is the Samuel Tredwell Skidmore House, a three-story Greek Revival house built for a cousin of one of 29 East Fourth Street's early residents, Seabury Tredwell. The De Vinne Press Building to the west and the Astor Library Building to the north are on the same block. Other nearby buildings include the Firehouse of Engine Company No. 33 one block south, 357 Bowery half a block east, and the Schermerhorn Building half a block west.
The site was formerly part of the estate of German-American businessman John Jacob Astor, who, in 1803, acquired land between what is now Astor Place and Great Jones Street. Astor subsequently built his mansion and horse stable directly to the west of the Seabury Tredwell House. In the 1830s, the wealthiest New Yorkers were starting to relocate northward from what is now the Financial District of Manhattan to what is now Lafayette Street in NoHo. At the time, the area surrounding Lafayette Street was still mostly undeveloped. Residential development in the area peaked at that time before moving northward again in the 1840s and 1850s.
History The house was first occupied by Seabury Tredwell, a merchant born in 1780 to a prominent Long Island family; he was a descendant of Samuel Seabury, an Episcopal bishop. Tredwell established a business on Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan around 1803 or 1804, which later became Tredwell, Kissam & Company. Tredwell married Eliza Parker in 1820, and the couple had seven children over the next fifteen years, before Tredwell retired in 1835. Although Tredwell had been a successful businessman during his career, he was not well known outside of his community.
Use as residence 19th century
Joseph Brewster, a hatter who also developed speculative real estate projects, acquired two land lots in 1831 for a combined $6,550 (). On one of these land lots, he built a townhouse at Fourth Street. Brewster built five additional houses on the same street. Brewster finished Fourth Street in April 1832 and lived there for three years. Brewster sold the building in 1835 to Tredwell for $18,000 (). It remained the Tredwell family's residence for nearly a century. They vacationed in New Jersey during the summer but lived on Fourth Street the remainder of the time, shunning publicity. Tredwell's youngest daughter, Gertrude, was born in the house in 1840. Gertrude, her two brothers, and her five sisters all lived there with their parents.
The family employed four servants at the house at any given time; almost all were Irish women, and they never worked more than a decade. Relatives of the family occasionally stayed there when they had nowhere else to go. In the 1850s—after the second-youngest daughter, Sarah, was severely injured in a stagecoach accident—a hand-pulled elevator was installed to bring Sarah to her bedroom, and the staircase to the third floor was rebuilt. The house was also one of the first in New York City to receive gas from the Consolidated Gas Company (later Consolidated Edison) in the mid-19th century. Seabury died in 1865, leaving each child $10,000 (). The family remodeled their house two years later.
Only three of the Tredwells' children married and moved out of the house; four daughters and one son never married. Eliza Tredwell died in 1882, followed by the siblings' unmarried brother in 1884. By then, many of their wealthy neighbors were moving away. The New York Times and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation indicate that it was not known why the family remained, but the Toronto Star wrote that the Tredwells were too poor to move uptown. The unmarried sisters—Julia, Phebe, Sarah, and Gertrude—remained in the house as spinsters. They gradually upgraded the furniture, although the sisters largely wished to retain the furnishings "as Papa wanted it". The sisters subsisted on the remnants of their father's estate, selling off land in Brooklyn and New Jersey as their savings shrank. Sarah eventually moved to the Cadillac Hotel near Times Square, where she died in 1906, leaving just Phebe, Julia, and Gertrude. According to Seabury Tredwell's great-nephew George Chapman, the family was "not a friendly lot".
Early 20th century By 1909, the only surviving sister, Gertrude, had reportedly become a recluse, hiring a maid who greeted the few visitors that she received. In her final two decades, Gertrude increasingly stayed in her second-floor bedroom because of her declining health, and one of her nephews moved onto the third floor. They mostly stayed in the house, going to Lake Champlain for a few weeks every year. Burdened with financial hardship, Gertrude was forced to sell her belongings and take out a mortgage on her home. Nonetheless, she preserved the building in its original condition, long after all the neighboring private homes had been demolished or converted to other uses.
Electricity, running water, and a furnace were installed around 1930. After her nephew died that year, Gertrude seldom had visitors, and she died alone in one of the second-floor bedrooms in 1933. A New York Times reporter wrote that Gertrude had died as "a gentle, well-bred [recluse] hemmed in by ugliness—and she had been forgotten." The building was unoccupied for the next several years. Although Gertrude had been poor at the time of her death, the house still retained many of the family's possessions. Visitors claimed that the structure was haunted by Gertrude's ghost, a legend that persisted in the late 20th century.
Use as museum
After Gertrude's death, Eliza Nichols, the daughter of Gertrude's oldest sister Elizabeth, wished to pay off the house's mortgage by selling both the structure and the objects inside. George Chapman purchased the building, saving it from foreclosure and demolition, and he paid Gertrude's mortgage. According to The New York Times, Chapman's acquisition had taken place "the night before the house and its furnishings were to go on public auction". He formed the Historic Landmark Society, which acquired the building and converted it into a museum called the Old Merchants' House. The new name was intended as a tribute to New York City's early merchants, including Seabury Tredwell. The Tredwells' items, clothing, table settings, and furniture were all displayed in their original condition, or as close to it as possible.
1930s to 1960s On May 8, 1936, the society held a private reception for the museum, which opened three days later on May 11. The New York State Education Department installed a plaque the same month, commemorating the fact that the house had been Seabury Tredwell's residence, and numerous photographs of the structure were taken as part of the Historic American Buildings Survey, and photographs of the interior were exhibited at Columbia University's Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library. The Historic Landmark Society launched a fundraising campaign in 1943, seeking to raise $100,000 (), but had received only $7,000 within two years (). At the time, the society spent $3,500 annually just to operate the museum (), and its 50-cent admission fee and 2,500 annual visitors were not enough to pay the operating costs. This led Chapman to warn that the building was in danger of being sold. Ultimately, he continued to operate the house as a museum. The museum's caretakers, married couple Harry Lundberg and Florence Helm, lived in the basement; Helm lived there until her death in 1954.
The museum attracted 1,000 visitors annually by 1950. By the next year, the endowment fund had grown to $25,000 () but was still short of its goal. The Boston-based Hale Foundation promised to donate $45,000 () if the museum's operators were able to match the donation, but this did not happen. Consolidated Edison installed a gas heating system in the museum in 1955. By the 1960s, the house was in very poor condition and needed $200,000 in repairs (). According to New York Times architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable, the structure was so weak that a severe storm could potentially destroy the plaster ceilings, and the original furnishings were "ready to crumble on a touch". The museum still did not have enough visitors to finance its own operation. Museum officials had unsuccessfully attempted to obtain funding from private donors, and Randolph Jack, its curator, was personally paying for the museum's upkeep.