As we scan through the names of so many politicians, artists, activists, writers, musicians,

bankers, merchants, and laborers, just to name a few that make up the tapestry of New York's

history over nearly 400 years, there are, of course, the names that we know, many of whom

still live with us on a daily basis in the street names and statues around the city.

But I'm always most fascinated perhaps by the names we don't know, those who were more ordinary people living more ordinary lives that perhaps are forgotten to history.

When we look at them through what is left in public documents and records, we see that they weren't so ordinary at all.

And today's show, a truly special one, highlights one of them, who in the end represented so much of what went on as the city transformed itself from the old into something altogether new.

Music from the old into something altogether new. Hello, I'm Carl Raymond, the host of the Gilded Gentleman History podcast where every two weeks

we take a look into the people and places of America's Gilded Age, France's Belle-Epaac

and England's late Victorian and Edwardian eras to truly see what lay beneath the glitter and the gold.

This week, we take a look at a unique and long-forgotten story, but one which gives us

rare insight into the social and economic shifts that, in fact, created and then propelled

the great gilded age.

The old New York townhouse has been called the miracle on 4th Street, and in so many ways,

it is. If you find yourself wandering in the no-ho neighborhood of New York's Manhattan

strolling just south of Astor Place along Lafayette Street,

and you decide to turn left on East 4th Street, you'll find it.

About halfway along the street, sitting in stately silence on the north side of the street,

is a lone row house.

It's easy to notice, as it stands all by itself without the once

nearly identical houses flanking it on either side and once with others stretching along both sides

of the street. Despite its solitary appearance, it has the understated elegance of a world long since gone.

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