New York City had been occupied by the British for nearly the whole of the American Revolution, and a considerable portion of it burned in the suspicious Great Fire of 1776. The occupiers had not generally treated the city with a very light hand, and when it was opened back up again for the general population, there would prove to be a quite thorny housing shortage.

Thomas Jefferson was unimpressed with the house he was able to rent here at 57 Maiden Lane, for which he paid a yearly rental sum of £100. The rooms were owned by two brothers, both in the grocery business.

Jefferson moved in on June 2, 1790, and filled the house with expensive furniture he had purchased in France and had shipped to the United States.

Jefferson kept several enslaved people with him at Maiden Lane, including James Hemings, brother of Sally Hemings, the enslaved half-sister of Jefferson’s late wife, with whom he had several children.

According to Jefferson’s accounts, he hosted both Alexander Hamilton and James Madison here for dinner on June 20, 1790. Popularized in the Hamilton musical number “The Room Where it Happens,” this occasion gave birth to the so-called Great Compromise. in which Hamilton—in return for allowing the permanent seat of the U.S. government to be on the Potomac, and thus in cultural control of Southerners—received the opposition’s political support for his proposed financial plan for the central government to assume the states’ Revolutionary War debts.

Jefferson vacated his New York City residence about August 31, 1790. He left extensive memoranda ordering his furniture, more effects arriving from Paris, and a large order of wine he had recently placed, to be forwarded to Philadelphia. He would then stop in Philadelphia to look for a house while en route to his plantation in Virginia.