The directors of the Merchant’s House Museum at 29 East 4th Street want to construct an architecturally appropriate rear porch on the back of this 1832 Federal style house, which is the only nineteenth-century New York family dwelling open to the public. To that end, the executive director, Margaret “Pi” Gardiner, has initiated an in-depth research project—supervised by Charles Lockwood, who will prepare a report on the project’s findings—so that an accurate restoration of the rear façade can be studied and planned.

The front facades of New York’s Federal style row houses have long been the subject of architectural and historical research. Virtually no one, however, has ever studied the backs of Federal style houses, or their yards. What did the rear facades look like? Did the rear Federal style facades have the partly open porches or “tearooms” like so many 1840s and 1850s New York row houses?

Of equal importance, what did the back yards of the city’s Federal style row houses look like? How were the rear yards used? Were they planted in ornamental shrubs and flowers? Or were they more utilitarian with uses such as a “bathing house” or toilet, a water-storage cistern, a wood pile, a smoke house, even a small stable? The research and report will answer these and many other questions.

The Board of Directors of the Merchant’s House Museum can then go forward with the design and construction of an architecturally-appropriate rear porch. This research project will also yield long-unknown information about the appearance of the rear facades of early nineteenth-century New York row houses, as well as the uses of the back yards, which will be useful to homeowners and scholars alike.

Completed in 1832, the Merchant’s House Museum has a late Federal style façade, complete with fanlight doorway and two dormer windows. Inside, its double parlors celebrate the city’s then-emerging Greek Revival style with Ionic columns between the two rooms, splendid marble fireplace mantels, and extraordinary Greek-influenced ceiling plasterwork. The property, home to the Seabury Treadwell family from 1835 to 1933, opened as a museum in the mid-1930s.

Vicinity of the Merchant’s House: the Bond Street Area

When the Seabury Treadwell family moved into their 29 East 4th Street row house in 1835, they were living in one of New York's most fashionable and best-known residential neighborhoods:   the Bond Street area, which consisted of the east-to-west streets north of Houston Street and adjacent to Broadway, specifically, Bleecker, Bond, Great Jones, and East 4th Streets.   Highly desirable Lafayette Place, location of the famed Colonnade Row, ran north-to-south several blocks from Astor Place to Great Jones Street.

There, elegant brick and marble-front row houses and mansions, the homes of some of New York's leading families, lined the serene tree-lined streets.   "The elegance and beauty of this section cannot be surpassed in the country," exclaimed one New York newspaper in 1835.  

The Bond Street area's years of residential fashion sadly were fleeting.   By the late 1840s, elegant shops and hotels began to replace the fine dwellings along Broadway in the Bond Street area and marked the beginning of the area's decline as a residential neighborhood.   "The mania for converting Broadway into a street of shops is greater than ever," wrote [diarist and former Mayor] Philip Hone in 1850.   "There is scarcely a block in the whole extent of this fine street of which some part is not in a state of transmutation."   Fleeing this unwanted commercial intrusion, the rich often-prominent families abandoned their by-then-old-fashioned dwellings in the Bond Street area for the showy "brownstone-fronts" of Fifth Avenue and Madison Square

After the Civil War, the Bond Street area lost all semblance of its patrician past.   The elegant dwellings became "restaurants of private boarding-houses, barroom or groceries, peculiar physicians' offices or midwives' headquarters."   Other houses became sweatshops, lofts, or warehouses.

In the 1880s, the city extended Lafayette Place, originally several blocks long, from Great Jones Street south to the City Hall area--thus cutting a rude swath through the middle of Bond and Bleecker Streets.   Noisy wagons and, later, trucks rumbled through the once-serene streets of the Bond Street area.   Soon after World War I, the last private dwellings on Bond Street succumbed to commercial usage.   Many were torn down, and newer commercial buildings erected on their sites.

Only a bedraggled handful of row houses survive on Bleecker, Bond, Great Jones, and East 4th Streets.   On Bond Street, for instance, only No. 26, with its elaborate fanlight doorway and dormer windows intact, recalls the street's past dignity.   A few pathetic houses still stand at the Broadway and Bowery ends of the block--the basement and first floors converted into a store front or truck-loading platform.

The Seabury Tredwell house on East 4th Street [now open to the public as the Merchant's House Museum] alone retains its original grandeur.   See above.