3-D Panoramic Tours: A Virtual Reality
Our 360-degree interactive panoramic tours invite cyber-visitors to ‘step inside and take a look around’ the Museum's authentic 19th-century rooms, arranged as they were when the Tredwell family occupied them for nearly 100 years and described by The New York Times as “the real thing.’
Brilliantly captured by photographer Jook Leung, the panoramas are the closest one can get, without actually being there, to the atmosphere of Old New York that pervades the Merchant’s House. A virtual reality.
Requirements. The 360-degree panoramic tours require the QuickTime player. If the panoramic tours don't launch, download QuickTime to make sure you have the latest version. (It's free.)
Instructions. To move around a room, click and drag your mouse. You can rotate your view 360 degrees horizontally (left and right) and 180 degrees vertically (up and down). Use the control and shift keys to zoom in and out.
Click on an image below to view the 360-degree panoramic tour.
Greek Revival Double Parlors
Greek Revival Front Parlor
Greek Revival Rear Parlor
The mirror-image Greek Revival parlors with their 13-foot ceilings provided the backdrop for important social activities of the wealthy merchant elite of the 19th century — from social calls to multi-course dinners.
The formal parlors feature identical black-and-gold marble mantelpieces, a stunning Ionic double-column screen, and mahogany pocket doors separating the rooms, and exquisite plaster detailing. Identical bronze gaseliers hang from matching plaster ceiling medallions, among the finest such designs extant.
On the mannequin in the rear parlor is a fancy dress of bronze silk taffeta with pagoda sleeves and trimmed with passementerie braid and jet beads, ca.1860-1865. It is one of 40 costumes documented to have belonged to the women of the Tredwell family.
Kitchen
Today it is quiet, but imagine this kitchen in full swing during the mid-19th century when the servants prepared meals for 14 people (10 in the family and 4 live-in servants). No doubt someone was always cooking or getting ready to cook — stoking the fires, chopping vegetables, pumping water, heating water, dumping water out back, plucking chickens, kneading bread dough, straining jelly, whipping cream — probably with a couple of Tredwell children underfoot.
Note the cast-iron stove, fueled by coal, and the beehive oven, which was built into the firebrick to the left of the fireplace. It was heated by burning a wood fire inside until the oven reached the desired heat. Children and servants bathed in the kitchen in the portable tin bath tub by the side of the fireplace. A 4,000 gallon cistern in the rear yard was fed with rain water by wooden pipes from the eaves and pumped into the kitchen with a water pump. The pie safe, ca.1830, was used to secure baked goods from vermin. The punctured-tin panels allow air to circulate within.
Eliza Tredwell's Bedroom
Seabury Tredwell's Bedroom
