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WPCNR TURNING BACK THE HANDS OF TIME. By John F. Bailey. March 8, 2026:
I walked back into New York City’s past Saturday.
I walked UP all 4 narrow steep red-carpeted stairs all 72 steps past a kitchen where Irish immigrant girls of the past cooked 8 course meals on a cast iron stove, responded to bells at all hours to the Joseph Brewster Family whims, three plush original Empire couch furnished parlors with cast iron fireplaces and feather-bed canopy bedrooms of the Brewster and Treadway families.
It is the 1832 Brewster House on East 4th Street.
As seen in 1936.
The narrow home built in 1832 as it looks today before scaffolding (now surrounding it) to repair the exterior
The Joseph Brewster House, today, NoHo, NYC..as seen today. It is currently surrounded with scaffolding but open to the public.
Perhaps the oldest home in New York City, now threatened by a developer who wants to build next to it. It is now at the mercy of the City Landmarks Commission. If anything is worth preserving it is this step (72 of them on the staircases) back in the early 19thCentury.
I like to think this is the first walk-up before the tenements of the Lower East Side, yet it is the first walkup where Jacob Brewster a hardware merchant built this house.
It was a mansion for its time. A house with servants, cooks, and a center of the social whirl of the high society of its time. Where ladies called on the ladies of the Brewster House presented personal cards and socialized with the mistress of the home in the posh parlors where Mrs. Brewster spend her day because her skirts were too wide to go up and down her stair 4 steps of stairs.
Where entertainments were held and eight-course dinners served out of a surprisingly efficient kitchen run by cooks and serving girls of the time who after immigrating from Ireland were able to find jobs as cooks and servants for 2 dollars to 7 dollars a day, and free lodging in the attic.
The Brewster exterior is being renovated at the present time, and you enter through the small park next to it on East 4th Street. If you are fascinated by the past it is a trip you must take to see.
The television and streaming programs that glamorize the past and make us long for the simpler days of this Hollywood-imagined elegance are put to shame by the realities of what life was like. Candlelight at night until gaslights came to the home in about the 1850s then electric lights in the late 19th century. One ancestor lived her entire life in the house (she died in 1933). The house is the first Designated Landmark building to be recognized in 1965 by the Landmark Commission.
THE KITCHEN ON FIRST FLOOR
THE FAMILY ROOM WHERE FAMILY ROOM ATE
The extremely knowledgeable guide taking the 10 person group on the kitchen to attic tour told the colorful history of the house with detailed vignette tales of parties, servant life, a homemaker’s routine and the advantages of rainwater water supply as opposed to city well water and how bathing was done, hotwater was not favored at that time. Showers were not available. I came away with the feeling that the glamorized past of Hollywood westerns and costume dramas paint a sanitized version of what it was like living distant times.
The Parlor for Receiving Visitors.
The Upstairs PARLORS RESERVED FOR ENTERTAINING
THE ENTRANCE TO THE SECOND PARLOR UPSTAIRS AND BELOW THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD HIDING PLACE BUILT INTO THE WALLS OF THE HOUSE COMPLETE WITH LADDER LEADING TO STREET
PROOF of The underground railroad –hiding place on the fourth floor
Your guide explains the abolitionist movement of which Jacob Brewster was very much a supporter. You see the tunnel Brewster had built into the walls of his new home to hide runaway slaves to New York as they moved on in the Underground Railroad on their ways to Massachusetts and New England where slavery was abolished.
It is five-story tunnel with a latter for descending. Details on what runaway slaves from the South before the Civil War researched by the society running the Brewster House were sobering. ( Slavery was not, and is not the wholesome existence portrayed in the novel/movie Gone With the Wind.)
From Westchester The Brewster House is accessible by train to Grand Central $29 from White Plains and the Number 6 on the world’s greatest electric train set (the subway) to Astor Place and a short walk to 4th Street in Greenwich Village. All pictures from the Joseph Brewster organization.