Renewal of Revival Merchant’s House Museum a taste of old New York in modern age

A unique place to visit in New York City, if you have done all the major things you came to do and want to escape the din of Midtown and the monotony of its street grid, is Merchant’s House Museum. Its charm and almost ghostly quiet is well worth the $5 entrance fee.

The museum is open from 1 to 5 p.m. Thursday through Monday and it is in an area with plenty to do afterward.

Go to Grand Central Station and take a downtown subway to Astor Place. From Astor Place, walk south on Lafayette Street and turn left into East Fourth Street.

Merchant’s House at 29 E. Fourth St. was built in 1832 and was occupied for 100 years by members of the Seabury Tredwell family until it was turned into a museum in 1936. Originally situated in the zenith of chic, Merchant’s House has been a sightless sentinel to decline, and now renewal, in the maze of streets that is Manhattan below 14th Street.

The Greek Revival, Federally accented former home is in the heart of NoHo, an area of the city where gentrification is under way, as individual buildings and flats are renovated and rents increased. NoHo’s once mean streets and the East Village’s meaner streets are now safe to walk thanks to developers and the New York City Police Department, but it is still wise to be wary at night.

Entering Merchant’s House, the vestibule between the front and hallway doors has a 13-foot-high ceiling. The plaster walls, sunlit from the Federal fanlight over the front door, are streaked with sienna to simulate Italian marble. The hallway leads back to an enclosed porch, now a museum office, from which steps once led to the enclosed garden at the rear of the house. At the rear of the garden, where there was once an alley, was the tradesmen’s entrance.

Entering the hallway from the vestibule, doors to the left open into double parlors that are separated by mahogany-veneered pocket doors that slide out of view between white Doric columns. The parlors, with gold-veined marble and solid, black-marble fireplace facings are mirror images of each other. The 13-foot-high ceilings are edged with plaster moldings. In the center of each ceiling are intricately detailed plaster medallions, through which lighting fixtures are suspended.

The rear parlor with windows on the garden is for formal dining. The front parlor, whose windows face the street are for formal entertaining. The windows of each are hung with red damask draperies. The parlors are

ranked among the finest examples of surviving Greek Revival architecture.

Below the parlor floor is the kitchen that backs onto the garden and the family dining room, whose windows face the street. There is a family entrance just below street level into a hallway that, as does the one above it, leads back to the garden. Half beneath the ground, the bottom level of Merchant’s House has 9-foot-high ceilings. The adult bedrooms above the parlor floor have 12-foot ceilings.

The children’s bedrooms were on the third floor, which now is used for the museum’s administrative offices. The fourth floor, with gabled windows facing street and garden, was for the Tredwell’s four servants. Above them was a storage attic. Outside, traces of old New York abound in the area.

Situated between Lafayette Street and the Bowery, Merchant’s House’s brick and granite facade endures as a testament to East Fourth Street, having once been part of the most fashionable residential neighborhood in New York. The exterior, with its cast and wrought iron railings and gate, which opens to the steps leading to the formal entry, and its still plush interior, comprise a time capsule of Henry James’ 19th century New York.

On Lafayette Street, just below Astor Place, is another New York City landmark, five nearly derelict, attached Greek Revival mansions built in 1833 and faced with Corinthian columns. Called Colonnade Row, one of its early residents was John Jacob Astor, who made a fortune in the beaver trade and Manhattan real estate and for whom Astor Place is named.

Beneath the columns at 434 Lafayette St. is the Astor Place Theatre where the Blue Man Group (reviewed in Time magazine) is playing. Across Lafayette at 425 is the Joseph Papp Public Theater, which has five stages and one movie theater. It once housed the Astor Library, a forerunner of the New York Public Library, and more recently the New York Shakespeare Festival.

At Cooper Square, a stone’s throw from Astor Place, is Cooper Union, a college founded in 1859 for the advancement of science and art. A short walk west of Lafayette is Washington Square, now dominated by New York University, but where 19th century houses, some of which were being built when the Seabury Tredwell family moved to East Fourth Street, still face the park.

In the past two decades, lower Manhattan has undergone a social and physical face-lift, as developers and police have elevated it from grime and crime into neo-chic. There is a new appreciation of once-elegant commercial buildings, now cleaned up, that became honeycombed with sweatshops as New York expanded toward the upper tip of Manhattan Island. The result is a new, relatively safe, playground that once was only for the adventurous. And, to erase past stigmas, developers have given new names to the areas below 14th Street.

Since the last decade, many of the city’s trendiest art galleries have been in SoHo (area south of Houston Street) and many of the city’s trendiest restaurants are in Tribeca (triangle below Canal Street). NoHo, a newer and fuzzier designation, is roughly north of Houston Street, and south of 14th Street. From west to east, it lies between the often-expensive charm of Greenwich Village and the dilapidated East Village, where renovators have begun work in earnest.

Merchant’s House was built when New York emerged as the pre-eminent port of the United States and Bangor was emerging as the nation’s pre-eminent lumber port. Greek Revival homes were being built in both cities. In 1832, Joseph Brewster, a hatter and real estate speculator, built two adjoining houses on East Fourth Street with the latest technological innovations in a planned residential neighborhood called the Bond Street Area. It was on the outskirts of the city.

Bowery, which intersects East Fourth Street and runs from Chatham Square in what is now Chinatown to Cooper Square, derived its name from a Dutch word for farm. Until 1800, when it began to emerge as the city’s most fashionable street, the Bowery bordered farmland. By the 1820s the lower Bowery was city’s theater district. Stephen Foster lived there.

In 1835, Brewster and his family moved out of 29 East Fourth St, and Seabury Tredwell, a hardware importer, his wife, and their seven children moved in to escape the hubbub of downtown New York. With piping for illuminating gas, a servant call bell system, and a 4,000-gallon cistern for water in the back garden, it was the latest in comfortable living for a rich merchant and the Tredwells furnished it accordingly.

In 1840, the Tredwell’s fifth daughter, Gertrude, was born. Despite her attractiveness, Gertrude and three of her sisters never married, spending their entire lives in the East Fourth Street house.

According to legend, Gertrude, who lived on in the house after her sisters died, had been the victim of a broken romance, and was the inspiration for the character of Catherine Sloper, the heroine of Henry James’ novel “Washington Square.”

In the mid-20th century, “Washington Square” was adapted for the stage as “The Heiress” and played to rave reviews. It was revived with acclaim in the 1990s. Gertrude Tredwell died a spinster in 1933 at age 93, in the bed in which she was born. She and her sisters had seen the Bowery decline from fashionability to depravity and the homes of their former neighbors turned into sweatshops.

But inside 29 E. Fourth St., the clock seems to have stopped sometime before 1900. It has an odd sense of tranquility.