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OK, so granted that you-along with everybody else-visit New York City for the frenetic pace, teeming street life and sophisticated glitz of the place.
But when the maddening crowds and social whirls threaten to unravel the delicate threads of late-20th-Century sanity, consider heading for the early 19th-Century refuge of the Old Merchant's House.
The nondescript brownstone at 29 East 4th St. in the East Village, just a Thunderbird-bottle's throw from the Bowery, gives no hint of the 150-year-old, perfectly preserved time capsule in the four-story mansion.
Take those first few strides down stone steps, past the graceful wrought-iron balustrade spun like a spider's filigree design, and you enter a house that looks exactly as it did more than a century ago when Miss Gertrude Tredwell, the last inhabitant, trod the opulent carpets and grassy back yard gardens in her restless spinster prowls.
Built in 1832
This New York town house was grand when Joseph Brewster built it in 1832 and grander still when prosperous hardware merchant Seabury Tredwell bought it three years later. It was the era when fashionable New Yorkers relocated from their downtown Wall Street-area residences to the more pastoral inclines of Washington Square, Lafayette and East 4th streets.
North of them sprawled farm lands; Central Park was no more than a green dream in...