Museum visit: New York’s Merchant’s House Museum
The 1832 Merchant’s House Museum on East Fourth Street in Manhattan. All photographs are courtesy of the Merchant’s House Museum. It was a dark and stormy afternoon when I toured the old Merchant’s House. Forgive my dramatic tone, reader, but for a house as storied as this one, it’s warranted. The museum, located in dowtown New York City on East Fourth Street, interprets nineteenth-century domestic life through the home and furnishings of a prosperous merchant family and their four Irish servants. Truly a portal to the past, the house is a Victorian time capsule, having been inhabited by the same family for nearly a hundred years. It retains all the original furnishings. Stunning inside and out, its red brick facade with Ionic columns and ornamental ironwork only hints at the jaw-dropping interiors that await. As I began my tour I was handed a booklet and instructed to proceed to the garden behind the house. The sky was still clear as I stood in this sanctuary of stone and lush greenery, a far cry from the working yard of dirt and grass it had been in the nineteenth century. The museum’s gardener, John Rommel, has been a devoted volunteer since 1995 and continued to tend to the verdant space even when the museum was closed at the height of the pandemic. After admiring his handiwork, I open the guidebook and begin to get acquainted with the house and its residents. Front parlor at the Merchant’s House, with its suite of rococo revival furniture and silk damask curtains. Photograph by Denis Vlasov. The building was one of two identical structures constructed by Joseph Brewster, a hatter, in 1832. In 1835 he sold one of them to merchant Seabury Tredwell for $18,000. Born and raised on Long Island, Seabury moved to New York