Hidden Passage Confirms a Safe House on the Underground Railroad
An important piece of New York City history, long hidden inside the walls and furniture of a historic house, has finally come to light.
The Merchant’s House Museum was built in Manhattan in 1832, but a recent discovery shows that there is still plenty to learn about it. After two years of research, a strange feature, still intact after nearly two hundred years, proves that the house was an Underground Railroad site. This is the first such discovery in Manhattan in over a century.
The second floor of the house includes a built-in chest with two doors over rows of drawers, all painted white. But removing the drawers on one side reveals an open space just big enough to crawl into, with a lid covering an opening in the floor that leads to a 15-foot vertical passageway within the walls. A pocket door on the lower floor, usually a space-saving feature, provided further concealment.
“We knew it was here, but didn’t really know what we were looking at,” Camille Czerkowicz, curator for the Merchant’s House Museum, told Spectrum News. Until recently, the passage's purpose was unknown. No other 1830s houses were known to have anything like it. Now, historians have determined its purpose as a hiding place for people escaping slavery, along with the abolitionist beliefs of the house’s builder, Joseph Brewster.
The house was purchased by the wealthy Tredwell family in 1835. Today, it displays the family's 19th-century furnishings and belongings against its late Federal and Greek Revival architecture. It is not known whether the passageway was used as part of the Underground Railroad while the Tredwells owned the house, or even whether they knew about it.
Opposition to slavery was not popular in the public opinion in New York City in the 1830s. Even though New York State had abolished slavery in 1827, the city had economic connections to the slaveholding states of the South. Safe houses, like the one built by Brewster, were deeply kept secrets.
Architectural historian Patrick Ciccone described the passageway as having “magnitudes of incalculable historical significance.” In addition to being, as he says, one of the “very few physical traces of the Underground Railroad anywhere in the U.S.,” it casts the entire house in a new light.
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