“I hope our students enjoy their snow day today and stay warm and safe throughout, but I do have some tough news to share. School will be in-person tomorrow. You can still pelt me with snowballs when you see me.” “It’s probably about the worst I’ve seen. I mean, I was here with the last big storm. I think that was where in 2016 or something. But it wasn’t as bad as this. And the problem is, when the plows come past, they just throw up all the snow. And there’s going to be a big bank here later. So I’m digging it out now to get rid of some of this.” “I do ski patrol on the Lower East Side. I like to check the parks, and sometimes I find people fall in the snow and they can’t get up, like a elderly gentleman went out in his pajamas to get a quart of milk. So, things like that.” “And if you can cook at home, please do so instead of ordering food to be delivered given the conditions. Make an enormous pot of soup and bring some to your neighbors upstairs.”

A person could access the passage here by removing the bottom drawer. There’s a built-in ladder inside the wall. And so you could catch your foot on that top rung and then lower yourself down into the ladder. The passage here at the merchant’s house was built when this house was built in 1832. It’s a secret space and meant to be hidden, but also very purposefully designed. Institutional archives tell us that the passageway itself was discovered in the 1930s, when the house was being converted into a museum, but we didn’t know its significance. Slavery was abolished in New York State in 1827, but New York’s economy was deeply entrenched with the slave economy. A passage like this could have been used to hide a person, really, for a very short period of time, perhaps while they were waiting for transport to their next destination. This passage is completely unlike any other house in this neighborhood. Any other house that we have seen that the architectural historians that we have worked with have seen. It’s really quite a remarkable find.