Merchant's House Museum

29 East 4th Street | NoHo | built 1832

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The lot about 1940
About 1940. Via 1940s.nyc
The lot about 1985
About 1985. Via 80s.nyc

The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.

Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.

  1. 1832

    April

    Joseph Brewster builds a row of Federal-style merchant houses

    Speculative developer Joseph Brewster completed six upscale red-brick homes with marble trim along East 4th Street, finishing No. 29 that April. He moved into the house himself, then sold it to the Tredwell family three years later.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  2. 1835

    Merchant Seabury Tredwell buys the house for his family

    The retired hardware importer, then 55, paid eighteen thousand dollars for the home. He and his wife Eliza Parker went on to raise eight children there, including their youngest, Gertrude, born in the house in 1840.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1840

    Gertrude Tredwell is born upstairs, the eighth child of the family

    In 1840 Gertrude, the eighth child of Seabury and Eliza Tredwell, was born in a second-floor bedroom of the house. Her sister Sarah had been born in 1835, the year the family moved in. The Tredwells furnished their home with work by Duncan Phyfe and Joseph Meeks, both New York cabinetmakers.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1865

    March 7

    Seabury Tredwell dies at 84, and his funeral is held in the parlor

    Seabury Tredwell died at 84 on the evening of March 7, 1865, and four days later his funeral was held in the house's parlor. He had made no alterations to the interior during his lifetime. His family then added only a few Victorian upholstered pieces to the parlor and otherwise left the rooms, as Gertrude kept saying, the way papa wanted them.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  5. 1907

    Phebe Tredwell falls down the staircase to her death

    Sarah Tredwell died in 1906, and in quick succession the parlor saw the funerals of the Tredwell sisters. Phebe died in 1907 after falling down the staircase. In 1909 the sister Julia died too, leaving Gertrude alone in the last elegant home in a neighborhood where commerce had taken over and old residences had become shops and warehouses.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  6. 1933

    Gertrude Tredwell dies as the last of the family in the house

    After her father died in 1865 and her unmarried siblings died one after another over the following decades, Gertrude Tredwell lived on alone, keeping the house as "papa wanted it" until her own death in 1933 at age 93.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  7. 1936

    May 11

    The Tredwell house opens to the public as a museum

    A distant relative, George Chapman, bought the property to save it from foreclosure and opened it to the public as the Old Merchants' House, forming the Historic Landmark Society to run it.

    Source: Wikipedia

  8. 1949

    Filmmakers for The Heiress tour the house to study its interiors

    Writers often suggest that Gertrude Tredwell was the model for Henry James's novel Washington Square, though that is not established. While the 1949 film version, The Heiress, was being made, the filmmakers spent considerable time touring the house to research its interior sets.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  9. 1956

    Alfred Hitchcock wants to film in the house, but the museum's operators block him

    In 1956 Alfred Hitchcock hoped to make a film at the Old Merchant's House, but the museum's operators stopped him. The house was then a small, struggling museum: it drew about 1,000 visitors a year by 1950, and an endowment fund that reached $25,000 the following year was still short of its goal.

    “Though Alfred Hitchcock had wanted to produce a film at the house in 1956, the museum's operators prevented him from doing so.”

    Source: Wikipedia

  10. 1965

    October 14

    The Landmarks Commission designates the house with no one speaking against it

    On October 14, 1965, the Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the Old Merchant's House. At a September 21 hearing more than ten witnesses backed designation, among them the secretary of the Historic Landmark Society, which owned the house, and nobody opposed. A curator of the Metropolitan Museum's American Wing called the house a singular survival, and the commission praised its remarkable state of preservation.

    “More than 10 witnesses spoke in favor of designation of the building including the secretary of the Historic Landmark Society, the owner of the building.”

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  11. 2018

    The museum director sues over a neighboring hotel she says could topple the house

    In early 2018 museum director Margaret Halsey Gardiner petitioned the state Supreme Court, claiming City Planning had approved a hotel next door on faulty information from its developer, Kalodop, and that construction could make the house collapse. The museum put up signs warning that legal costs could bankrupt it. She sued formally in mid-2018, and a City Council subcommittee voted against the hotel plans that September.

    Source: Wikipedia

Further reading

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