Albert Einstein House

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Albert Einstein House sits at 112 Mercer Street in Princeton, New Jersey, a modest cottage that bears no historical marker explaining why it matters. Einstein lived here from 1935 until his death in 1955 - two full decades in a house he never wanted turned into a shrine. He reportedly asked that the home not be made a museum, and the family agreed. Yet within a year of his death, the house had begun a second life, passing through the hands of Nobel Prize winners and scholars, each one living quietly in the shadow of the man who had spent his final years inside its walls. What does a house say about its most famous occupant when that occupant insisted it say nothing at all? The answers involve a step-daughter who was also a sculptor, a physicist who made the house his condition for moving to Princeton, and an institution that paid over a million dollars to keep a private residence private.

• 2. The Cottage on Mercer Street

  ›

  Built in 1838, the house originally stood on Alexander Street, where Stuart Hall of the Princeton Theological Seminary was later constructed. When that building went up, the cottage was relocated, and a neighboring house at 108 Mercer was displaced in the same move. The structure itself is a simple pattern-book cottage - the source describes it plainly as "not in itself of unusual significance." It is 3,674 square feet with only one bedroom and two baths, set on a half-acre parcel that extends 446 feet back from the street. Elsa Einstein purchased the home from Mary Clark Marden on the 24th of July 1935. The deed recorded a price described only as an undisclosed sum. The Mercer County Clerk's Office registered that deed on the 1st of August 1935, and the Einsteins moved in.

• 3. A House of Women

  ›

  Elsa Einstein died in 1936, barely a year after signing the deed for the Mercer Street house. After her death, Albert Einstein continued living there with three women: his sister Maja, his step-daughter Margot Einstein-Marianoff, and his secretary Helen Dukas. Margot Einstein-Marianoff, born in 1899, was a sculptor by profession. She outlived her step-father by more than three decades, dying in 1986, and she owned the house for the entire period between Einstein's death and her own. Helen Dukas, Einstein's secretary, anchored the household's daily operations for those years at Mercer Street. The household's arrangement - a famous physicist surrounded by a small circle of women who managed his affairs and shared his space - rarely figures in the standard telling of his life, but it shaped the texture of those final two decades.

• 4. Landmark Against His Wishes

  ›

  Einstein's request that the house not become a museum was honored in the most literal sense: the building never opened to visitors and carries no explanatory historical marker to this day. Strategically placed "Private Residence" signs are the only acknowledgment of its status. The institutional record, however, moved in a different direction entirely. The house was added to the National Register of Historic Places and then designated a U.S. National Historic Landmark in 1976, more than twenty years after Einstein's death. The designation formalized what the family had resisted - the idea that the address itself carried historical weight regardless of who lived there. That tension between private memory and public patrimony persists: the landmark designation is on the books, the museum never opened, and the signs around the property still warn strangers to keep their distance.

• 5. Nobel Laureates in Residence

  ›

  Frank Wilczek, a physicist who would win the Nobel Prize in 2004, occupied the house between 1989 and 2001 while working as a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study. He reportedly made living at 112 Mercer Street a condition of his move to Princeton - a striking demand that the IAS apparently met. During his tenure, Wilczek held evening seminars in the house for graduate students, which gave the cottage a second run as a center of intellectual life. After Wilczek left, Eric Maskin and his family moved in. Maskin, who held the Albert O. Hirschman Professorship in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study until 2011, shared the 2007 Nobel Prize in Economics with two other recipients. He went on to become a professor of economics at Harvard University. The IAS purchased the house outright in 2012 for $1,417,500, taking formal ownership from Maskin's family.

• 6. A Private Landmark Today

  ›

  Since 2012 the house has been owned by the Institute for Advanced Study and remains a private residence, closed to the public. No sign explains its history to passersby on Mercer Street. The IAS's purchase price of $1,417,500 for a one-bedroom, two-bath cottage in a residential neighborhood reflects both the property's modest footprint and the weight attached to its address. The half-acre parcel, stretching 446 feet from the street, gives the house a buffer of distance that amplifies the effect of the "Private Residence" signs posted around it. The IAS continues to assign the residence to affiliated scholars, preserving a tradition that stretches back to Margot Einstein-Marianoff's ownership - a line of occupants who live inside history while the street outside remains unaware.