Text: Chelsea Square, “Poe's Fordham Cottage,” New York Times (New York, NY), vol. LIV, no. 17,374, August 19, 1905 (Saturday Review of Books, Part II, Literary Section of the New York Times), p. 546, col. 4

[page 546, column 4, continued:]

Poe's Fordham Cottage.

New York Times Saturday Review of Books:

Mr. Arthur Thomas Dyson's suggestion In your issue of Aug. 12, that. Poe's cottage be carted across King's Bridge Road from the position it occupied during the poet's residence in Fordham to a “park” that is absolutely devoid of the Poe atmosphere, is invidious and harmful, but, withal, welcome.

No real admirer of the greatest poet that America has produced will witness a disaster so wholly unnecessary without raising a dismal howl in opposition to it.

Thrusting aside the question of sentiment, the expedient thing for the city to do to save some future administration a greater outlay of money than is now necessary is to condemn the property to the south of the cottage, demolish the cheap, unsightly blots on modern architecture that have all but squeezed the life out of the house in which poor little Virginia died, and restore the whole, as nearly as possible, to the scene with which the poet was familiar.

Mr. Dyson's suggestion is harmful in that it opens an easy way for the city's Fathers, whose appreciation of poetry is anything but profound, to get around a knotty question. They would see at once that to drag the cottage across the thoroughfare would cost less than the inevitable step I have mentioned, and nothing in the wide world would so tickle the Aldermanic fancy as to place that charming bit of Dutch handiwork in the centre of a prim plot of ground.

Mr. Dyson has fallen into the common mistake of taking at its value the deceptive sign on the gable end of the Fordham cottage, which, within the small space of one square foot, contains two glaring errors in fact and a picture that, by its very presence, misleads. The observer is informed in plain black letters that Edgar Allen [[Allan]] Poe lived in the house from 1844 to 1849, when, in reality, he didn’t move there until the Spring of 1846, and a decent sketch of a raven leads him into the erroneous belief that the poet's most popular poem was written within.

CHELSEA SQUARE.

New York, Aug. 17, 1905.