Writing Students Visit Merchant’s House Museum

This fall, Professor Laura Hydak and students in her Writing 101 classes studied The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton’s tragic tale of love and high society in nineteenth-century New York City.   To enhance their sense of the novel, students visited Merchant’s House Museum, a historic row house built in 1832 at 29 East Fourth Street and occupied by the same affluent family throughout the nineteenth century.  Little has changed about the house since—the furniture, appliances, and even the bell system used to ring for the servants remains now, just as it was then.  Some even say that the ghost of the family’s last surviving member, Gertrude Tredwell, still haunts the house.  On October 1^st, students received a private tour of the house and lush garden as a guide explained the highly ritualized customs of affluent nineteenth-century New Yorkers. 

For more information on the museum, click here. 

Published: October 14, 2014