Text: Charles Hemstreet, “Literary Landmarks of New York,” The Critic (New York, NY), vol. XLII, March 1903, pp. 237-243

[page 237:]

WHEN New York was a much younger city than it is, when it was well within bounds on the lower part of the Island of Manhattan, long before there was a thought that it would overspread the island, jump over a stream and go wandering up the mainland; overleap a river and go spreading over another island to the sea, — long before the time when these things came to be, there lay scattered in several directions on the Island of Manhattan and dotting the rolling country land beyond, several tiny villages. These were Harlem, and Yorkville, and Odellville, and Bloomingdale, and Chelsea, and Greenwich. The last was the hamlet closest to the city. Quaint and curious, it spread its scattered way along the Hudson River where houses had been set up according to the needs and vagaries of men on roads natural and unplanned. When the city grew larger and finally swept around Greenwich Village, the roads becoming city streets, the village continued a labyrinthian way, where strangers wandered and were lost before they knew it.

In the very core of this old-time Greenwich section and at the very place where the streets are so tangled, so irregular, so crooked, so often no thoroughfare, so winding that they seem to be seeking out the old farm-houses [column 2:] which they led to in early days, there is a pretty little playground for children. This Hudson Park is an open spot with green lawns and marble walks and a tall iron fence surrounding it; quite a model park with everything about fresh, and new, and modern. It is so very new and so very neat and so very clean that one would not look there for old-time flavor. But curiously enough one thing about it seems out of tone. On the green lawn is a monument old and faded which, in an effort to match it with its natty surroundings, has been set upon a base of glistening white marble. The monument is a sort of key for the antiquarian, for without it this playground in its spick-and-span newness might not be readily identified as the old St. John's Burying Ground, where once stood the accumulated tomb. stones of more than fourscore years, until they were swept away and buried as deep as those whose memories they marked. A new generation tramples in and romps over the new park, with no knowledge or thought of what is below the surface.

The graveyard of St. John's was a quiet, restful place in a quiet, restful locality in the year 1837, when Edgar Allan Poe had a habit of wandering through it. In that year Poe lived within a few steps of the burial-ground in a modest wooden house that was [page 239:] numbered 113 Carmine Street. He was then in his twenty-eighth year, had published three volumes of poems and had written some short stories and criticisms. He had but just given up the editorship of the Southern Literary Messenger at Richmond, a position he had secured through the friendship of John P. Kennedy, who had been his friend in his early struggles in Baltimore and who was to continue a friend to him through all his life. In 1832 Poe had first met him, when Kennedy was writing “Swallow Barn.” Afterwards Kennedy wrote “Horse-shoe Robinson” and other books before abandoning literature for politics and, in time, becoming Secretary of the Navy.

So Poe came to New York and with him Virginia, his child wife, who was already marked a victim of consumption, and there in the Carmine Street house they lived. Sometimes she walked with her sombre-faced husband [column 2:] through the near-by burying-ground, but more often she sat at an upper window from which she could watch him on his ramble. In the same house lived William Gowans the book-seller of Nassau Street; and there Poe did work for the New York Quarterly Review; there also he finished “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.”

In another house, some little distance away but in a direct course up Carmine Street, in Sixth Avenue close by Waverly Place, Poe lived for a short time but long enough to write “The Fall of the House of Usher” and some magazine work, when he went to Philadelphia to the Gentleman's Magazine, edited by William E. Burton, the famous comedian. Oddly enough when Burton died years afterwards he found a resting-place in the obscure St. John's Burying Ground.

It was not until 1844 that Poe returned to New York, and during the years of his absence several writers [page 240:] with whom he was to become acquainted on his return had forged their literary way. There was Seba Smith, more generally known as “Major Jack Downing,” from the humorous papers which he wrote under that name, and who about this time was writing the romance in verse called “Powhatan.” There was William Ross Wallace, the lawyer and magazine writer, who in after years was to be known through his poem of “The Liberty Bell.” There was the Congregational clergyman George B. Cheever making his way, having resigned his first pastorate at Salem, Massachusetts, where he had been imprisoned for libel on account of his temperance sketch “Deacon Giles's Distillery.” There was Robert H. Messinger, known through his Horatian ode, Give Me the Old,” his fame daily expanding in fashionable and literary circles. There was Edward Robinson, Professor in the Union Theological Seminary, just returned from a tour of exploration in Palestine with Rev. Eli Smith, publishing “Biblical Researches in Palestine.” And there was Isaac McLelland, whose verse was as good as his sportsmanship. These were some few of the men who were first to recognize the genius of the poet.

Poe returned to New York the wiser for his experience with the Gentleman's Magazine and with Graham's Magazine, but having failed to establish The Stylus, a proposed publication of his own, which during all his life was to be a vision of Tantalus, just beyond his grasp. He returned rich in experience; strong in adversity, poor in pocket. There was no glorious opening for him, and finally he accepted a sub-editorship on the Evening Mirror, grinding out copy for several hardworking hours each day.

The Evening Mirror was a newly started publication, but its interests were so entwined with others that its history stretched back something more than twenty years from the day when Poe first occupied a desk in the office. Going back these one and twenty years, the better to understand the atmosphere in which Poe worked, to the [page 241:] spring of 1823, the time is reached when George P. Morris and Samuel Woodworth joined forces and opened an office for the publication of the New York Mirror at 163 William Street. Morris was a young man then, but already gave strong evidence of the decided character he was to develop as an eminently practical printer and successful writer of songs — a man of such unusual personal magnetism that well-nigh every man who walked towards him a stranger walked away from him a friend. The eight years which followed the starting of the New York Mirror saw many changes; saw Morris becoming more and more popular as a writer of songs; saw him publishing the memorable “Woodman, Spare that Tree” that was to make his name known over the land; saw Woodworth withdraw from the Mirror, and that publication strengthened and starting anew when Morris drew to the enterprise Theodore S. Fay and Nathaniel P. Willis; saw Fay going abroad in a few years as Secretary of Legation at Berlin, in which city he was to live out most of his life.

N. P. Willis was a young man, too, in those early days of his association with Morris. He had given up the American Monthly Magazine at Boston to devote his energies to the New York Mirror. In the year that he became associated with Morris, 1831, he went abroad at a salary of ten dollars a week, hoping to add strength and diversity to the paper by a series of letters. In London, poor and struggling, he managed to introduce himself into the fashionable set at that time presided over by Lady Blessington, and he came to be the adoration of all the sentimental young ladies in that set. There was a daintiness about his dress, a suggestion of foppishness in the arrangement of his blond hair, trifles about him which suggested the dandy and the idler; but withal there was a terrific capacity for work under the smooth outside. His letters to the Mirror and other papers did much for the refinement of literature and art, and, indirectly, for the manners of the times, He was in America again in [column 2:] 1836, bringing with him an English lady as a bride, — the Mary for whom the country place Glen Mary at Owego was named, where he wrote his delightful “Letters from Under a Bridge.” He was again in Europe in 1839, soon starting The Corsair, and back to America in 1844, to join his friend Morris (the Mirror by this time being defunct) in the starting of a daily paper which took the name of the Evening Mirror. From this on Willis lived an active social-literary life, singing of Broadway with the same facileness as he sang of country scenes. He came to be a grave and patient invalid, living happily with his second wife as he had with his first, and ending his days at Idlewild, — his home on the Hudson.

It was with the newly started Evening Mirror that Poe became connected on his return from Philadelphia, and it would seem that if he ever had prospects bright to look forward to it was with the fair-minded, business-like Morris and the gentle-hearted Willis. But when Poe had continued with them a brief six months even that gentle restraint proved too much. The Evening Mirror did not last long after his going, though this had little to do with its failure. Then the indefatigable Morris, with Willis, started the Home Journal at 107 Fulton Street, which continued into the twentieth century, and is now known under its changed title of Town and Country.

While Poe was working on the Mirror he lived with his frail wife Virginia [page 242:] and her mother Mrs. Clemm, in Bloomingdale Village. It was a village indeed then, and about the scattered houses were broad roads and shaded — and clustering trees. The house in which Poe lived was on a high bluff beside a country road which is now 84th Street, the house standing (as the thoroughfares run now) between Broadway and West End Avenue. It was a plain, square, frame dwelling with brick chimneys reaching high above the pointed roof, kept by Mrs. Mary Brennan, and Poe rented rooms of her. Two windows faced towards the Hudson, and he could sit and looking through the trees catch a silvery glimpse of the river. Here he wrote “The Raven” and “The Imp of the Perverse.” From here he sent “The Raven” to the American Review at 118 Nassau Street, where it was published over the pen name of “Quarles”; and he was still living here when the poem was reprinted in the Evening Mirror, for the first time over his own name.

It had come to be the summer of 1845 when Poe left the Evening Mirror for the long black desk in lower Nassau Street where he helped Charles F. Briggs conduct the Broadway Journal. Briggs was the matter-of-fact “Harry Franco,” a journalist of great ability who in another ten years was to edit Putnam's Magazine from 10 Park Place. More than one of Poe's friends said that the combination of Harry Franco and the poet must assuredly bring forth great literary results and financial success. But the partnership did not work at all well. In a very short time Poe bought out his partner's interest through an arrangement with Horace Greeley and moved. the office of the paper into Clinton Hall. But the Broadway Journal under the management of Poe was less of a success than it had been under Briggs and Poe, and the poet retired from it in the first month of 1846.

This Clinton Hall in which Poe had his office was a substantial building at the southwest corner of Nassau and Beekman streets. Temple Court now stands on the site. A second and a third building of the name have arisen [column 2:] in Astor Place, the second having been remodelled in 1854 from the Astor Place Opera House, the scene of the Forrest-Macready Riots. The present building, tall and heavy looking, is the home of the Mercantile Library, as each Clinton Hall has been in its turn, and still retains the name first given to it in 1830, when Governor De Witt Clinton presented a History of England as a nucleus for the library.

About the time when Poe was with the Broadway Journal he moved into a house not a great many steps from Broadway, in Amity Street, since renamed West Third Street. Here amid surroundings marked by a simplicity due less to simple tastes than poverty Poe lived and wrote by the side of the delicate wife who was wasting away before his eyes. Here he penned the “Philosophy of Composition,” by which he would make it appear that “The Raven” was not a product of inspiration, but the work of calm reason and artistic construction, — a theory which no one seems to have accepted. Here, too, he wrote “The Literati of New York,” a series of papers that appeared in Godey's Lady's Book, and were the sensation of the hour in literary circles. Their criticisms were severe and impassioned, and one of the criticised, believing himself ill-treated and his writings unjustly abused, sought vindication. His answer entirely overlooked the libel laws and he was promptly sued for damages by Poe. This was Thomas Dunn English, a young man then twenty-four years old, who a few years before, in 1843, had been asked by N. P. Willis to write a poem for the New Mirror. The poem was written and sent to Willis with the suggestion that he either print it or tear it up as he thought best. Willis printed it, and though the writer came to be known as a poet, author, physician, lawyer, and statesman, the best known of his achievements were these verses of “Ben Bolt.”

In the spring of 1846, when the poet's wife grew more feeble, her brilliant eyes more brilliant, and her pallid look more unearthly, Poe [page 243:] moved out into the country to a little village called Fordham in Westchester County. This was then far out from the city, a secluded spot with rocky heights from which a view could be had of country lanes and broad sweeps of meadow where farmers worked in the fields. Since then the open landscape has given way to the regularity of city streets and buildings.

Not a great distance from the railroad station still stands the house where Poe lived; such a plain, low wooden building that those that have grown up around it seem to be shouldering it out of the way, and the widening and improving of streets have pushed it somewhat aside from its original position. But there the dingy little house still stands with its veranda where Poe walked in the night just outside the sitting-room windows, — walked and dreamed out his “Eureka.” There is the door and the dwarf hallway. Inside, to the right, is the room with its meagre furniture, much of which was purchased with the proceeds of the suit against Thomas Dunn English, where Poe received the friends who remembered him in his hours of illness, of poverty, and distress. In a room towards the front lay the dying wife on her straw bed, covered with the poet's coat and clasping the tortoise-shell cat closely to her wasted form. Up the stairs is the attic chamber, with its slanting roof, where Poe worked, with the cat at his elbow; where after his wife's death he penned a dirge for her in the exquisite “Annabel Lee”; where he wrote the first [column 2:] draught of “The Bells,” which he was to revise and complete while on his lecture trip to Lowell. Next to it is the room where slept Mrs. Clemm, his more than mother.

So many memories cling to this home of Poe that those who search for substantial literary reminders have made it a visiting shrine, much to the dismay of land-owners who hold to the strong belief that historic old houses are well enough as curiosities, but are inconvenient things when they stand in the way of money-making improvements.

After passing through these rooms and with the memory of Poe strong upon you, walk away along the street | remembering that in Poe's time it was a delightful country road. Stroll towards the Harlem River as he wandered many a moonlight night, his brain busy with the deep problems of “The Universe.” After a time you will pass on to the High Bridge, that carried the pipes of the Croton Aqueduct over the river, this at least unchanged since his day. Walk over the path there, high above the water, and visit the lonely spot where the suggestion came to Poe for that requiem of despair, the mystic “Ulalume.”

In the little wooden house at Fordham Poe lived, weak and lonely and poor, after the death of his wife, making daily visits to her near-by grave, — the grave that is there no longer. He was cared for by Virginia's mother for something more than two years. Then in the June of 1849 he left Fordham. Before the end of the year he was dead.