History
The House
Built in 1832, the Merchant's House Museum is a unique survivor of Old New York. Just steps from Washington Square, this elegant red-brick and white-marble row house on East Fourth Street was home to a prosperous merchant family for almost 100 years.
Complete with its original furniture, decorative objects, clothing, and personal memorabilia, the house offers an rare and intimate glimpse of domestic life from 1835 to 1865, during the pivotal era of the mid-19th century when New York City was transformed from a colonial seaport into a thriving metropolis.
Merchant's House, circa 1899
The Family
An importer of hardware with a business downtown on Pearl Street, near the South Street Seaport, Seabury Tredwell was a typical wealthy New York City merchant of the first half of the 19th century.
In 1835, he and his wife, Eliza, moved their large family of seven children, two boys and five girls, into the red-brick and white-marble row house located in the Bond Street Area, near Washington Square, just north of the rapidly growing city. Since the 1820s, this exclusive residential suburb had provided a refuge for wealthy merchants who wanted to escape the commercial congestion of lower Manhattan.
In 1840, five years after the Tredwells moved to East Fourth Street, an eighth child, Gertrude, was born in the house. Over the years, as the city continued to grow and fashion changed, the Tredwells' neighbors gradually abandoned the neighborhood for more elegant houses "uptown." But the Tredwells remained. Gertrude Tredwell never married and continued to live in the house until she died in an upstairs bedroom in 1933. The house was opened to the public as a museum in 1936.
Seabury Tredwell
Eliza Tredwell
Gertrude Tredwell
The Neighborhood
The NoHo Historic District, designated in 1999, includes approximately 160 buildings, 11 of which are distinguished as individual NYC Landmarks. Taken together, these 11 buildings tell the remarkable story of the economic, social, and technological forces that transformed New York during the 19th century.
In 1832, when the Merchant’s House was built, elegant Greek Revival row houses of red brick and white marble flanked the tree-lined streets of this fashionable residential enclave, known then as the Bond Street Area. At mid-century, cast iron construction made its first appearance with the founding of The Cooper Union. Commercial buildings and factories gradually began to dominate the area. By the 1880s wealthy residents moved uptown, completely abandoning the neighborhood. By century’s end, Louis Sullivan’s 12-story steel-framed office building was scraping the sky on Bleecker Street.
Today, Historic NoHo is once again a very fashionable place to live, work, shop, and dine, proving that history does indeed repeat itself!
Click here to download a printable walking tour of Historic NoHo's Landmark buildings.
Bond Street, circa 1857
The Museum
The architectural and historic importance of the Merchant's House has been recognized by numerous landmark designations:
- 1936, documented by the Historic American Buildings Survey
- October 14, 1965, designated by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission as one of the first 20 New York City landmarks
- 1965, designated as a National Historic Landmark -- one of only 2,000 in the country
- December 22, 1981, designated as a New York City interior landmark
- Listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
New York Botanical Gardens recognized the significance of the Merchant's House by including a model of it in their annual holiday train show.
