New Yorkers Honor Edgar Allan Poe

1920

Cottage Where Edgar Allan Poe Lived and Dreamed Has Been Preserved for Posterity.

Edgar Allan Poe is America's best-beloved writer abroad, according to Vicente Blasco Ibanez, the famous Spanish novelist. The author's greatest afternoon in America was the one set aside for a quiet visit to the humble and tragic home of the author of "The Raven" and "The Cask of Amontillado."

Poe's cottage is a quaint little one-story frame house, painted white, on the Grand Concourse on the upper fringe of the city. The ground around it has been dedicated and is known as Poe park. The building is just the same as it was when Poe lived there in company with his fantastic satans and ethereal sweethearts.

A party of five went with Ibanez. It was just dark when they arrived at the Poe home. The air was chilly and dank, as Poe would have said. Six or seven candles spluttered feebly against the walls and threw fantastic shadows into the small bedroom where, so history hath it, the author of "The Raven" had spent so many nights of anguish and unearthly vision.

It is strange but there are very few New Yorkers who know where Poe lived and they have never seen the park or the little tragic cottage. The only indication that it was the home of the genius of the odd is the little black raven painted in the front.

There is a little porch, much like a modern doll-house porch. At night Poe used to sit out there alone with the stars, smoking and dreaming. Then he was in the wilderness, for New York was many miles away. Off to his right was the Hudson and the Jersey coast. Around about him were all sorts of night cries. He loved the mysterious wails, the ghostly shadows that creep about at night. Many ambitious writers go there at night now to drink in the mental pictures that came to Poe — but instead are howls of the Bronx kiddies, the honk of the auto, the grind of car wheels and all the complex noises of a congested center.