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The Merchant's House Museum, New York

 

Where Gumbo Was 520

I'm a native New Yorker, and even though my family wandered during my childhood, I've lived in the city for the last 62 years. And until late last year I never knew the Merchant's House Museum existed, much less visited it. And, to my surprise, friends or family I asked didn't know either!

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In a way, that's not terribly surprising, though. What is now the museum was once the private home of a well-to-do but ordinary family. No one in the Tredwell family invented the light bulb or ran for President or starred on the stage.

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Instead, Seabury Tredwell bought and sold hardware until he was rich enough to sell the hardware business in 1835, become a real estate investor and buy a house in what was then a fashionable district in lower Manhattan, and move in with his wife and seven children. His last child, Gertrude, was born in the house in 1840, and she is a key piece of the story.

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The Tredwell family carried on an upper middle-class lifestyle that included social calls on others and at-homes to receive social equals, occasional parties or balls and dinner parties—but nothing like the scale of the truly wealthy, the Astors, Vanderbilts and others of that ilk.

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Formal rooms, including a parlor and dining room were on the first floor, up the steps from street level; a family parlor was on the floor below the steps, along with the kitchen and access to the garden, which provided vegetables as well as an outdoor space for the family.

20221222_141925Once common, the house's garden is now unusual in Manhattan

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Indoor 'convenience' meant a chamber pot in a closet when the house was new, but the door in those days wasn't glass! The main stairway led to the bedrooms upstairs.

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Like most families of their class, the Tredwells had several servants, including a maid or two, a handyman and a cook. Among their jobs was carrying coal to the seven fireplaces and stoves and keeping the fires going. That would have meant carrying the coal up twice a day from the cellar. Ten steps to the ground floor, 14 to the parlor floor, 22 to the first bedroom floor, 20 more to the other  bedrooms, and 16 to the servants' quarters in the attic.

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The kitchen got modest updates over time, especially the coal stove that was fitted into the open fireplace for cooking. A large 'pie safe' kept baked goods safe from mice and bugs while allowing ventilation.

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The family continued to live in the house as the children grew up, as the neighborhood became first commercial and then eventually disreputable. They stayed as all but three of the children moved on, as Seabury and his wife died, and on into the Great Depression of the 1930s. By 1909, Gertrude was the only survivor and only resident.

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In all that time, hardly any large-scale change was made to the house. A coal stove was added into the kitchen fireplace; gas, and then electricity were added when they became available, but the furniture was re-upholstered rather than being replaced, the curtains and drapes replaced by similar... no rush for fashion here, even though in the early days, what they had was very fashionable... when it was new, and ladies paid formal afternoon calls.

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By the 1930s, though, there was no wealth left, and Gertrude lived on very small resources from a mortgage loan and tenaciously held on to the house. By that time, its possible sale value might not have kept her well anyway; it was surrounded by cheap commercial buildings and wouldn't have drawn a high price.

20221222_14345020221222_144706The complexities of 19th-century clothing for women, illustrated

When she died at 93, in 1933, a distant cousin bought it to prevent foreclosure, and arranged for it to become a museum. Later, it was taken over by a non-profit, and eventually had a major renovation to repair the ravages of its decades of wear. In 1995, it became one of the first group of twenty buildings designated under New York's brand-new Landmarks law.

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The Tredwell house is the only 19th-century building in Manhattan to have both its Federal-style exterior and its Greek Revival interior and its original furniture and fittings intact, but the Merchant's House faces a new threat to its survival.

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The neighborhood has once again become chi-chi, and a developer wants to build a hotel on the playground next door. A plan for a 16-story building was defeated, but the owner can legally build an eight-story version.

20221222_144913One Tredwell daughter had a back injury that led to a hand-powered elevator being installed; this was part of the pulley mechanism that made  it work. Below, the servants' quarters.

Engineers have told the museum that there is no way to build the hotel without serious damage to the Tredwell house. The best case would be closing for several years while being essentially blanketed during construction; the worst case is undermining and demolition.

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The museum is now involved with Landmarks and the developer trying to find a working solution, but no clear path has emerged, and some repair and renovation work is on hold until one does. One can only hope... this is too precious a resource to be teetering on the edge of jeopardy!



Congratulations to PortMoresby and George G who both correctly identified the location, and to Joyce Wichmann who knew a pie safe when she saw one!

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The best part of every trip is realizing that it has upset your expectations

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UPDATE

The Merchant's House is again (February 2024) under threat, with plans for a building next door, this time a seven-story building whose design and use have not yet been determined. The situation is covered at length in a column in today's New York Times.

The plan has been cleared by the Landmarks Preservation Commission, with a series of safeguards to protect the 192-year-old mansion, but both experts and museum staff believe construction would cause serious damage, at the minimum destroying the fragile original plaster in the Merchant's House rooms.

The museum is a non-profit operation that operates with a lease from the city, which owns the building, a common arrangement for New York museums, including the Met. The city has committed to $3.2 million in restoration work on the house, scheduled to start later this year.

Andrew Berman, the executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation acknowledged that the safeguards called for in LPC's approval “far exceed what is typically required,” but also said “I don’t have a crystal ball to be able to say whether or not that will do the job here in terms of keeping the Merchant’s House safe. I will also say we’ve had multiple experiences with the city where precautions that were supposed to be taken never happened and buildings were damaged as a result.”

The best part of every trip is realizing that it has upset your expectations

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