In an old row house in New York City's East Village, there's a secret passageway.

Today, that row house is a museum. It's called the merchant's house. It was built in 1832,

and its claim to fame is that it has been meticulously preserved.

The family that lived in the house donated it, and the museum kept it basically as is.

And actually, that secret passageway, it's not such a secret.

Historians have known about it for decades.

In 1933, someone pulled out a drawer of one of the built-in closets and found a lid.

When you lift the lid, it uncovers an opening to a passageway that goes down.

Pull out a rattley dresser drawer, and there's a two-by-two-foot opening, with wooden rung

was leading down to the basement pantry below. It ends there. The original exit is long gone.

You have to pull it out of the closet and set it aside and then you can see the space.

So it's a really visceral experience.

But the purpose of this secret, or not so secret, the passageway was its own kind of mystery.

Its opening is a walk-in closet between two of the bedrooms. So people initially thought, maybe it was a laundry shoot or a way for cheeky

younger members of the family to sneak out at night. But then in 2023, the museum historian made a discovery.

And it turns out, the passageway is much more complicated than they thought.

I'm Johanna Mayer, and this is Atlas of Skira, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

Today, we learn the truth behind this passageway and how it changes everything we thought we knew about why the merchant's house really matters.

And why it's now at risk of being destroyed.

I'm going to say, On a spring day in 2026, I made a trip to the Merchants House Museum.

From the outside, it doesn't really stick out as very different among the other Manhattan row houses.

The Merchants House is a row house that's on East 4th Street in New York City.

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