Manhattan's Most Intact Greek Revival Rowhouse and the Tredwell Family
29 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003
Age
All Ages
Cost
$$
Self-guided admission and guided tours are ticketed at modest prices; reduced admission for students, seniors, and members.
Access
Limited Access
Four floors connected by original wood stairs; no elevator
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1832 · National Historic Landmark · NYC Landmark 1965 · Only Fully Preserved 19th-Century Family Home In Manhattan · Tredwell Family Collection Intact
The house at 29 East 4th Street was built in 1831 and 1832 by Joseph Brewster, a hatter, as a speculative Greek Revival rowhouse in what was then the fashionable Bond Street district. The wealthy merchant Seabury Tredwell purchased the house in 1835 for $18,000 and moved his family into the residence. Tredwell, born in 1780, had made his fortune as a partner in Tredwell, Kissam & Company, an importer of marine hardware on Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan.
Seabury and his wife Eliza Parker raised eight children in the house. The youngest, Gertrude Tredwell, was born in an upstairs bedroom in 1840. Gertrude never married and lived in the house continuously for ninety-three years, dying there in 1933. Through her decades of solitary occupation she preserved the furnishings, fixtures, clothing, and possessions of her family essentially unchanged from the mid-19th century — a near-unique survival in New York.
In 1936, three years after Gertrude's death, a distant cousin, George Chapman, purchased the house out of foreclosure to prevent its demolition and founded the Historic Landmark Society to operate it as a museum. The house opened to the public as the Old Merchants' House in 1936.
The building was designated a New York City Landmark in 1965 and a National Historic Landmark in 1965. It is one of the very few American 19th-century houses where both the exterior architecture and the interior contents survive intact from a single family. The collection includes thousands of objects, from Eliza Tredwell's gowns to Seabury's account books to the family's original servant call-bell system.
The museum remains an active nonprofit. Recent decades have seen ongoing structural and legal battles over a planned hotel development on the adjacent lot, which the museum has argued would threaten the structural integrity of the historic rowhouse.
Sources
Merchant's House is unusual among American haunted-museum sites because the institution itself openly catalogs paranormal accounts in archival form. The museum maintains an Our Ghosts section on its official website documenting reported phenomena collected from staff, docents, contractors, and visitors across the museum's 90-year operating history.
The most-reported figure is identified by witnesses as Gertrude Tredwell. The eighth and youngest Tredwell child, Gertrude lived in the house continuously for 93 years from her birth in 1840 to her death in 1933. Witness accounts describe a woman in a brown 19th-century dress moving through the front parlor and along the upper staircase. Witnesses include museum visitors, docents, and on multiple occasions photographers and journalists. The figure is consistently described as benign rather than menacing; some visitors have reported feeling lightly touched on the arm or shoulder.
Other phenomena recorded by the museum include disembodied piano music from the empty parlor, the sound of conversations from the family rooms, the smell of cooking from the basement kitchen, and footsteps on the upper staircase when the house is empty. The museum's collected accounts include first-person narratives from named contractors and electricians who were working alone in the building at the time.
The New York Times described Merchant's House as Manhattan's most haunted house in a 2008 feature, a designation the museum now uses in promotional materials for its seasonal candlelight ghost tours. The tours are theatrical interpretations rather than investigations, with costumed guides presenting both the documented family history and the paranormal record.
Notable Entities
Media Appearances
Self-guided tour of the only 19th-century family home in New York City preserved intact, with original Tredwell family furniture, clothing, and possessions across four floors. The Greek Revival exterior and ground floor are unchanged since 1832.
An after-hours candlelit tour offered seasonally that presents the family's documented history alongside the museum's well-known paranormal accounts. The New York Times has called the house Manhattan's most haunted.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
New York, NY
The Morris-Jumel Mansion at 65 Jumel Terrace in Washington Heights, Manhattan is the oldest extant house on the island, built in 1765 as a Palladian summer villa for British Colonel Roger Morris. The house served as General George Washington's headquarters from September 14 to October 18, 1776, and later as the home of merchants Stephen and Eliza Jumel. New York City has owned the property since 1903.
Syracuse, NY
The Erie Canal Museum occupies the 1850 Syracuse Weighlock Building, the last surviving structure of its kind in the United States. The building served as a working weighlock — essentially a giant scale for canal boats determining toll fees — from 1850 until weighing was discontinued in 1883. The museum was founded as a private non-profit in 1962, and the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1971.
Westfield, NY
McClurg Mansion was built in 1818 by James McClurg, the son of a Pittsburgh industrialist, in what was then frontier western New York. Contemporaries called it 'McClurg's Folly' for its ambitious scale — large rooms and high ceilings at odds with the surrounding log cabins. The 14-room Federal-style mansion was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1984 and has housed the Chautauqua County Historical Society since 1951.