Merchant's House Museum

One family, ninety-eight years

Joseph Brewster, a hatter, built the house in 1831 and 1832 and sold it in 1835 to the merchant Seabury Tredwell for $18,000. Tredwells lived in it until 1933. Gertrude, the eighth child, was born in the house in 1840 and died in an upstairs bedroom at 93, unmarried, having outlived the rest of them.

What she left behind is the reason the place exists. The furniture, the clothing, the family papers, the kitchen equipment and the bell system were all still in position, which made it the only intact nineteenth-century family home in New York City. It opened as a museum in 1936. In 1965 it was among the first 25 buildings the city landmarked, and the interior is protected separately from the facade.

The ghosts are on the museum's own website

Staff and visitors report Gertrude on the stairs and in the upper rooms, and the Irish servants who worked in the basement kitchen. The museum does not hold the subject at arm's length. It runs candlelight tours after closing, and its own site publishes an account of the reported activity alongside the furniture inventories.

What is threatening it

Since 2012 the museum has been fighting a development at 27 East 4th Street, the lot immediately west, currently occupied by a single-story garage. Kalodop II Park Corp has pursued a building on that lot for more than fifteen years, and a nine-story proposal surfaced in February 2026.

The objection is structural, not aesthetic. The house is unreinforced masonry with original plaster ceilings and original plaster keys, and preservation engineers retained by the museum have concluded that excavation and construction against the party wall would cause irreversible damage, with collapse a credible worst case.

The museum's position is that the house cannot be underpinned or braced without destroying the thing that makes it worth saving.

Guided tours run Wednesday through Sunday at noon, last 60 to 75 minutes, and need a reservation. Self-guided visiting runs from 1pm to 5pm with last entry at 4:30pm. General admission is $15.50, or $10.50 for seniors and students with identification, and the guided house tour is $20.50.

Candlelight ghost tours run after closing in the fall, roughly every half hour from 6:30pm to 9pm, last about 50 minutes, and cost $45 or $35 for members. October dates sell out, so those want booking weeks rather than days ahead.

This is a narrow row house from 1832 with steep original stairs and no elevator, which puts the upper floors out of reach for some visitors. It sits between the Bowery and Lafayette, with Bleecker Street on the 6 the nearest subway.