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Photos by Marisol Díaz
POE COTTAGE located at 2460 Grand Concourse is one of the Bronx Historical Society’s museums. The walls feature images including a 20th century advertisement for an adaptation of Poe’s ‘The Raven’, below.
Tintinnabulation still resonates at Poe Cottage By Shant Shahrigian
sshah@riverdalepress.com
N
estled among the bustling Fordham streets teeming with students, shoppers and traffic, sits the once placid cottage where one of America’s most notoriously tormented and eminent writers plied his craft. Edgar Allan Poe, who is often credited with developing the modern short story and mystery, lived with his wife and aunt between 1846 and 1849 in the house after it was converted from a farmhouse to a cottage on a bucolic estate. Today the house is situated at 2460 Grand Concourse after city officials relocated it a century earlier just steps across the street from its original location near the corner of 192nd Street and East Kingsbridge Road. “I always tell people, if there are any ghosts, they’re across the street looking for the house,” said Angel Hernandez, an educator for the Bronx Historical Society. The biggest room in the house is a parlor where Poe possibly wrote “The Cask of Amontillado,” the short story about a man who seeks and seemingly achieves retribu-
tion with impunity. The chiming bells from the church at Fordham University, then known as St. John’s College, purportedly inspired Poe to write the hypnotic lines about their tintinnabulation in the appropriately titled poem The Bells: “How they clang, and clash, and roar! What a horror they outpour.” While the Bronx Historical Society has strived to recreate the 19th century ambience of Poe’s house for visitors today, a 2010 renovation stripped and repainted the cottage’s white exterior while workers made structural repairs to the 1812 building. Still, the Poe Cottage maintains traces of the melancholy narrative of its former inhabitants. Poe and his family retreated to the area
hoping the fresh air would provide a cure for his wife, Virginia, who suffered from tuberculosis. Virginia was only 13 when she married Poe, who was 27-years-old at the time. She was also his cousin. However, some scholars suggest the two may have lived as siblings and the marriage was never consummated. Next to the parlor is the cramped room where the author’s wife slowly died of tuberculosis, a disease carrying an imminent death sentence in the 19th century when no treatment was available. “This is where Poe, I’m pretty sure, spent most of his time, trying to take care of his wife,” Mr. Hernandez said. A stately wooden bed with two decapitated posts fills the otherwise empty room. Poe likely considered his wife, who expelled her last breath in 1847 in
the same bed, when he wrote the poem Annabel Lee, an ode to a deceased love. For those who have closely read this elegy, the room is potentially the most captivating in the house; some interpretations of the verse hint at necrophilia. Today, classes of students on field trips, literary fans and curious tourists pass through Poe’s attic room where a video about the author and the history of the cottage introduced by Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. plays. Poe vacated the house before his wretched and puzzling end in 1894; he died five days after he was discovered semi-conscious and delirious along a Baltimore street, presumably from a combination of alcohol poisoning, epilepsy and heart failure, though the precise cause of death was never determined. “It’s ironic,” Mr. Hernandez said. “The father of mystery writing’s death is a mystery.” The Poe Cottage is open Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sundays between 1 p.m. and 5 p.m. Admission is $5 for adults and $3 for children, students and seniors.
EDGAR ALLAN POE’s kitchen, in photo at far left, contains period furniture similar to what the writer and his contemporaries used. THE ROCKING CHAIR and the wall mirror, at top right, were original possessions of Edgar Allan Poe. Today they’re in the parlor of Poe Cottage. THE BED where Edgar Allan Poe’s wife Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe spent her last years.
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