Chronicles: Merchant’s House

 
The Merchant’s House Museum has been called by the New York Times, “Manhattan’s most haunted house.” Whether that is true or not remains to be seen, but needless to say, the Merchant House exudes an other worldly air, a transportation into the past, that should be experienced.
 
Built steps away from Union Square, the red-brick, Federal-style Merchant House was built in 1832, occupied by a single family of merchants for almost a hundred years. The family was the eight children household of Seabury Tredwell and his wife Eliza. Seabury Tredwell imported hardware and moved his family to this wealthy ‘suburb’ of Manhattan in the mid-1800s. While their neighbors began to move further uptown to more fashionable apartments in the late 1800s, the Tredwells stayed. Eventually, the final Tredwell left in the house was the youngest daughter Gertrude who died in an upstairs bedroom in 1933. It was three years later that the house became a museum with the interior left nearly entirely intact, making it one of the finest surviving Greek Revival rowhouses in America.
 
The Merchant’s House Museum
29 East Fourth Street, New York, NY 10003

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