{"id":137661,"date":"2026-02-18T18:14:11","date_gmt":"2026-02-18T18:14:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/137661\/"},"modified":"2026-02-18T18:14:11","modified_gmt":"2026-02-18T18:14:11","slug":"a-200-year-old-house-concealed-underground-railroad-passage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/137661\/","title":{"rendered":"A 200-Year-Old House Concealed Underground Railroad Passage"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here\u2019s what you\u2019ll learn when you read this story:<\/p>\n

An 1832 New York City home that has served as a museum for 90 years was hiding a centuries-old secret: a passageway that was part of the famed Underground Railroad, which shepherded escaped slaves to freedom.Though the museum was focused on the Tredwell family, who occupied the home for nearly 100 years, the builder and previous owner, Joseph Brewster, was an ardent abolitionist in his day, intentionally building the secret passage within his home.The embattled Manhattan museum faces threats from a neighboring development, which put the newly-discovered passageway in jeopardy.<\/p>\n

This story is a collaboration with Biography.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

New York City was a hotbed for abolitionist advocacy in the years leading up to the Civil War. Henry Ward Beecher, brother of Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe<\/a>, called for the end of slavery from the pulpit of his Plymouth Church in Brooklyn. Frederick Douglass<\/a> wrote in his memoir of befriending a sailor named Stuart on the New York City streets in the aftermath of his own escape from bondage (disguised, himself, as a sailor). And Sojourner Truth<\/a> lived on Canal Street from 1829 to 1843.<\/p>\n

New York\u2019s role in the network of safe houses dubbed the \u201cUnderground Railroad\u201d is no less sprawling, albeit spotty in the contemporary historical record. As the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Eric Foner lamented in 2015\u2019s

Merchant\u2019s House Museum<\/a> in Manhattan confirmed what had been reported the day prior by the city\u2019s stalwart NY1 news station<\/a>: a previously unknown passageway was hidden within the walls of the 1832 home, which has been open to the public as a museum for the last 90 years. That passageway, obscured by a set of built-in drawers, likely served as a \u201csafe house\u201d for escaped slaves being transported to freedom via the Underground Railroad.<\/p>\n

\"whiteMichael Natale<\/p>\n

The built-in drawers on the Merchant\u2019s House Museum\u2019s second floor.<\/p>\n

\"interiorMichael Natale<\/p>\n

When the bottom drawer was removed, a narrow passageway led down to the building\u2019s lower levels, allowing for an expedient escape for runaway slaves.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is really an important find for our city,\u201d remarked Council Member Harvey Epstein, in whose district the Merchant\u2019s House Museum resides at 29 East 4th Street. \u201cIt\u2019s important to know how New York<\/a> played a vital role in the Underground Railroad and how people came here, and how the person who built this, built this intentionally as a place for people to come and be safe and secure.\u201d<\/p>\n

This last part of Epstein\u2019s remarks is one of the elements that makes this such a remarkable find. This narrow passageway, tucked away beneath drawers and running from the home\u2019s second floor to its basement kitchen area, was not retrofitted into the well-to-do 19th-century home: the home was designed specifically to incorporate that passageway. In other words, it was a hiding place with an impressive home built around it.<\/p>\n

But for anyone who visited the home during its 19th-century life as a private residence, or the many who have roamed its halls on self-guided tours in its 90 years as a museum, nothing at all would have seemed out of the ordinary for a residence of its era.<\/p>\n

Indeed, the first floor, with its ornate furniture and the sliding parlor doors in the room\u2019s center, is very reminiscent of the nearby childhood home of future president Theodore Roosevelt<\/a> on East 20th Street (both homes have survived the centuries in the ever-evolving city thanks to preservation efforts on various governmental levels: the land beneath the Merchant\u2019s House Museum, as well as its neighboring Manuel Plaza, are owned by the New York City Parks Department, while the Roosevelt home is now operated on a federal level as the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site<\/a>).<\/p>\n

\"interiorMichael Natale<\/p>\n

Just 16 blocks away, and built less than 20 years later, the boyhood home of future president Theodore Roosevelt bears many similarities in design to the Merchant\u2019s House, including sliding parlor doors\u2026<\/p>\n

\"interiorMichael Natale<\/p>\n

…however, the partial walls built to contain the Joseph Brewster-built pocket doors are far wider than necessary for the doors. We now know they were constructed as such to conceal the house\u2019s Underground Railroad passageway.<\/p>\n

Only on closer inspection would one notice an odd quirk in the Merchant\u2019s House\u2019s pocket doors: the width of the colonnade arch into which those sliding doors were built. It is a gap far greater than is typical of the time, more than enough space for the slender sliding doors. What is evident now is that it was designed to be wide enough for a person fleeing bondage to slide discreetly in-between the floors above and below the lavish parlor space.<\/p>\n

But of course, while visitors at the museum<\/a> throughout the years may not have noticed anything amiss, why did it take so long for the museum itself to recognize what was going on within its walls? As it turns out, it\u2019s simply because they were focused on the wrong homeowner. <\/p>\n

The museum is named after the merchant Seabury Tredwell, who purchased the home in 1835 from its designer and original owner, Joseph Brewster. Since Brewster only resided in the home a few short years, it was long believed that he had built the home simply as a speculative development to earn a profit. Remarkably, the home stayed in the Tredwell family long past the point when many of New York\u2019s wealthy had left Lower Manhattan for greener, less congested pastures.<\/p>\n

\"formalMerchant\u2019s House Museum<\/p>\n

Portrait of Seabury Tredwell (1780-1865), a prosperous merchant\u00a0who purchase the home in 1835.<\/p>\n

\"framedMerchant\u2019s House Museum<\/p>\n

Portrait of Joseph Brewster (1787-1854), a hatter\u00a0who built the house and resided there just three years, is now known to have been an ardent abolitionist.<\/p>\n

As the city\u2019s 18th-century church steeples became obscured and eclipsed by skyscrapers, the Tredwell home stayed frozen in time, thanks to the enduring presence of Seabury\u2019s unmarried daughters. It was they who preserved the home the way \u201cPapa\u201d had always kept it, and when the last surviving daughter, Gertrude, finally shuffled off of this mortal coil in 1933, she left behind a multi-story exemplar of life a century ago, one that was swiftly made into a museum by George Chapman, founder of the Historic Landmark Society.<\/p>\n

That century of single-family ownership, the all-encompassing Tredwell of it all, is what drew the museum\u2019s focus for much of its existence. That’s why the conspicuous opening beneath a dresser was never thought to have had any great significance. Absent any other explanation, some even posited that it was a type of laundry chute.<\/p>\n

Related Story<\/p>\n

\u201cThe story of the museum itself, as a time-capsule, of having all its original interior furnishings intact has almost been so unbelievable,\u201d noted architectural historian Patrick W. Ciccone during the press conference, \u201c[…] it blotted out interest in [original owner Joseph] Brewster himself.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was only when Ann Haddad, our museum historian, discovered two years ago that Joseph Brewster, who built the house in 1832 […] he was an abolitionist, a fervent, card-carrying abolitionist,\u201d remarked Executive Director Pi Gardiner. Discovering Brewster\u2019s robust history with the abolitionist movement in New York, including explicitly authorizing the construction of a similar passageway in a nearby church on Bleecker Street, suddenly turned a nearly-century long mystery into an inarguable artifact of a fraught time in American history.<\/p>\n

\"groupMichael Natale<\/p>\n

Executive Director Pi Gardiner presents an image of the building\u2019s exterior at a February 12th press conference regarding the Underground Railroad passageway.<\/p>\n

As the Brewster-built home was not far from other well-known abolitionist sites of the era, such as the American Anti-Slavery Society at 142 Nassau Street, and the homes of fellow activists David Ruggles (36 Lispenard Street) and James W.C. Pennington (28 Lispenard Street), Popular Mechanics asked Haddad whether there was any evidence Brewster interacted with other prominent abolitionist figures of the era.<\/p>\n

\u201cResearch has shown that Joseph Brewster surrounded himself with abolitionists: in his daily life, in his religious life, in his working life,\u201d Haddad told PopMech. \u201cParticularly the Tappan brothers, who were the big, big abolitionists of the period, who began the Anti-Slavery Society and were really outspoken abolitionists.\u201d<\/p>\n

Related Story<\/p>\n

Though we often think of New York as a free state, it should not be thought that keeping such prominent abolitionist company<\/a> was a popular position in the city of New York. The truth was very much the opposite. Though slave labor was no longer present directly in the streets of Manhattan (and this was not always the case), this hub of economic growth still relied on the products and profits of the involuntary servitude brutally implemented in the American South.<\/p>\n

Historic preservation attorney Michael Hiller made the consequences of such political advocacy abundantly clear when he took the podium at the museum\u2019s press conference. \u201cBased upon my research, this is the first intact shelter point of the Underground Railroad discovered in Manhattan since the Hopper-Gibbons House in Chelsea was sacked and set on fire by a pro-slavery mob in 1863.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"19thBettmann\/\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

A 19th century illustration depicts a mob attacking a brownstone during the Draft Riots of 1863.<\/p>\n

Museum staff told PopMech that in addition to the house that became the Merchant\u2019s House Museum, Joseph Brewster also developed the adjacent property, 27 E. 4th Street. At present, there is no clear picture of where the Underground Railroad passageway let out. If Brewster designed the home at 29 E. 4th deliberately to act as a refuge for self-emancipated peoples, it is not a stretch to imagine he may have incorporated elements of his 27 E. 4th property into that elaborate escape route as well.<\/p>\n

\"accessMichael Natale<\/p>\n

The bottom of the secret Underground Railroad passageway, as it presently exists, exits into a \u201cmodern\u201d kitchen added into the downstairs space when the house was converted into a museum.<\/p>\n

To find out would require more time, more funding for research, and the preservation of the properties both beneath and adjacent to the Merchant\u2019s House. <\/p>\n

But this newly-uncovered passageway serves as a pressing reminder that preservation efforts are not just about holding on to the history we already know, as Gertrude Tredwell had with her father\u2019s furnishings for nearly a century. It is also about discovering the unspoken American history we still have yet to learn.<\/p>\n

Download Pop Mech Digital Issues\"Chevron\"Chevron\"Headshot<\/p>\n

Michale Natale is a News Editor for the Hearst Enthusiast Group. As a writer and researcher, he has produced written and audio-visual content for more than fifteen years, spanning historical periods from the dawn of early man to the Golden Age of Hollywood. His stories for the Enthusiast Group have involved coordinating with organizations like the National Parks Service and the Secret Service, and travelling to notable historical sites and archaeological digs, from excavations of America\u2019 earliest colonies to the former homes of Edgar Allan Poe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Here\u2019s what you\u2019ll learn when you read this story: An 1832 New York City home that has served…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":137662,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[58440,9,11,10,12],"class_list":{"0":"post-137661","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-biopop","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-new-york-headlines","11":"tag-new-york-news","12":"tag-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137661"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137661\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/137662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}