Make Gertrude Tredwell your Facebook Friend!
Recently, I visited the Merchant's House Museum on East 4th street here in New York. The house, built in 1832, is exceptional because it contains all of the original furnishings and possessions of the family that lived there for almost 100 years. How can such a thing happen? Well, the mother and father of the family both died in the 1860s; the three youngest daughters, unmarried, lived out the rest of their lives in the home, and never changed a thing after their parent's death. The beds had been moved in to the bedrooms the in 30's and had never moved again.
That is a little weird, right?
Gertrude, the youngest daughter, died in the 1930s. The house was recognized for the time capsule that it is and was almost immediately purchased and opened to the public.
I had been at the museum once before, at a funeral reenactment several Halloweens ago. They upped the anty on other funeral reenactments I had seen by including a wax corpse.
Additionally, should you visit, take note of the house next door. "If there is a three-dimensional, bricks-and-mortar definition of forlorn, it is the abandoned Samuel Tredwell Skidmore House, which has stood at 37 East Fourth Street since 1845 - ever more tenuously in recent years.
"This sorry state is no accident...but rather a result of deliberate "demolition by neglect" by the owner, identified as the estate of Sol Goldman.
"What makes the decay of the Skidmore House so striking is the existence just 75 feet away, at 29 East Fourth Street, of the Merchant's House Museum, an exquisitely maintained landmark that was built in 1832 and occupied three years later by Seabury Tredwell, Skidmore's cousin once removed, and his large family.
"Margaret Halsey Gardiner, the executive director of the Merchant's House Museum, says she has watched despairingly as the neighboring Skidmore House fell apart. Occasionally, she got inside.
"Margaret Halsey Gardiner, the executive director of the Merchant's House Museum, says she has watched despairingly as the neighboring Skidmore House fell apart. Occasionally, she got inside.
"In the early 1990's, she said, the house was still "manageably reparable" and possessed a remarkable number of 19th-century features: shutters, doorjambs, doorknobs, floorboards, a stairway balustrade with newel post and a lantern in the front hall.
"With each passing year and each fire and each wall collapse, she said, more of these elements vanished, some carted off by workers, some appropriated by neighbors.
"The heartbreaking final straw, Ms. Gardiner said, was the disappearance five or six months ago of the original bell pull at the front door. It still said "Skidmore," 123 years after Samuel Tredwell Skidmore died in that house.
" 'Skidmore,' " she marveled. " 'Skidmore!' There it was.
"'I should have stolen it myself.'"
Read the full New York Times article; a ruling was made in 2004 that the owner must preserve the Skidmore house, a historical landmark, but it still looks like shit.
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