Postcard Thursday Redux: Happy Birthday, Edgar Allan Poe

Happy Birthday, Edgar Allan Poe! Born on January 19, 1809, in Boston, Poe would, in his short life, become one of the most important American writers of all time. He invented the modern detective story, was an early champion of not just horror but science fiction, was a brilliant poet, and a cunning hoaxster.

Below are some highlights from posts we've done about Poe over the years. Of course, he also has an entire chapter in Footprints in New York, so pick up a copy today!

Edgar Allan Poe didn't live in New York City all that long, but he left an indelible stamp. Of all the places he lived, only one still survives, Poe Cottage in the Bronx. The postcard above depicts what is considered by many to be Poe's most important NYC residence -- the place where he wrote "The Raven."

As we write in Footprints in New York:

As [Poe's wife] Virginia’s tuberculosis worsened in 1844, the Poes took the only advice most doctors could give: move out of the city and get her into cleaner air.... [T]hey rented rooms from Patrick and Mary Brennan in “an old-fashioned, double-framed” farmhouse on the west side on what would eventually be 84th Street. The house was surrounded by 216 acres of woods. According to one of Poe’s earliest biographers, the family “received no visitors, and took their meals in their room by themselves.” Mrs. Brennan recalled Poe as a “shy, solitary, taciturn person, fond of rambling alone through the woods or of sitting on a favorite stump of a tree near the banks of the Hudson River.” In Poe’s era, Riverside Park had not been created, and the waterfront was not yet developed this far north. This meant Poe probably didn’t actually scramble all the way down the Hudson’s banks for his reveries; he watched the river drift by from the top of [a nearby outcropping of rock known as] Mount Tom.

courtesy of The Museum of the City of New York

The Poes’ room—unaltered until the house was torn down in 1888— was small but filled with light, having windows that faced the river on one side and the Brennans’ forest on the other. Years later, people who knew the house recollected that the Poes’ room was exactly like the chamber in “The Raven,” complete with the “pallid bust of Pallas” above the door. This may have been wishful thinking, but the house does seem, from photos and drawings, to have been a pleasant place. Pleasant enough, in retrospect, to make one almost forget the Poes’ straitened circumstances. Poe had difficulty making the rent. For much of his marriage, he had trouble putting food on the table. When Poe won a $225 judgment in a libel lawsuit, he used the money to buy some furnishings and a new suit; he could never afford to own more than one suit at a time, and the previous one was probably beyond repair.

Most inconveniently, the Brennan house’s distance from the city may have provided fresh air, but it also meant that any time Poe needed to meet with a publisher, he either had to take a stagecoach down the Bloomingdale Road—a costly inconvenience—or walk the ten miles round-trip.

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Poe Cottage in the Fordham section of the Bronx; courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York

Courtesy of the New York Public Library

Poe Cottage, the third-oldest building in the Bronx, is open for visitors on weekends. If you want to travel farther afield, you can actually stay in a full-sized replica (above) of the house at the Dearborn Inn in Michigan.

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The morning of April 13, 1844, New Yorkers awoke to find an astonishing headline in the New York Sun:

THE ATLANTIC CROSSED IN THREE DAYS! 

SIGNAL TRIUMPH OF MR. MONCK MASON'S FLYING MACHINE!!

The article went on to detail how Monck Mason and his traveling companions had set off from England in the gas-filled balloon Victoria and landed in Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, three days later. An amazing triumph, Monck's flight promised to revolutionize transportation and communication.

Of course, it wasn't true. Two days later, the Sun had to publish the following retraction:

The mails from the South last Saturday night not having brought a confirmation of the arrival of the Balloon from England, the particulars of which from our correspondent we detailed in our Extra, we are inclined to believe that the intelligence is erroneous. The description of the Balloon and the voyage was written with a minuteness and scientific ability calculated to obtain credit everywhere, and was read with great pleasure and satisfaction. We by no means think such a project impossible. 

The hoax was the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Nine years earlier, the Sun had perpetrated the "Great Moon Hoax," and, as Matthew Goodman argues in his book The Sun and the Moon, Poe was annoyed at the newspaper for, in his mind, appropriating an idea from one of his own short stories for that series. The balloon hoax may have been Poe's way of getting back at the newspaper. If Poe is to be believed, the balloon hoax brought on a surge in sales for the Sun--and thus would have caused them great embarrassment when the story had to be retracted. (There's some thought that it was Poe who wrote the retraction, as well.)

The complete balloon hoax can be read online at http://www.poestories.com/text.php?file=balloonhoax.

(If this post seems familiar, it is; it is largely a repeat of our post from last year on Poe's birthday.)

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Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

Postcard Thursday: Historic Living in NYC

courtesy of the New York Public Library

Today's image shows the Dakota Apartments, ca. 1890, when the Upper West Side was first becoming a significant residential neighborhood. When the building had opened six years earlier, it stood the notion of apartment-living on its head. Prior to this point, bachelors and immigrants might live in hotels and tenements, but the idea of a luxury apartment building was unheard of.

As James writes in today's issue of the New York Post:

the cornerstone was laid for the Dakota at 1 W. 72nd St. in 1880, spurring a revolution in luxury living. The developer, Edward Clark, had the bad habit of selling apartments before they were finished, which sent architect Henry Hardenbergh scrambling to revise his blueprints during construction. As a result, according to Stephen Birmingham’s book “Life at the Dakota,” spaces ended up as small as four rooms and as large as twenty. Currently, there’s an 11-room apartment — complete with seven working fireplaces — on the market for $15.5 million. That’s for a space without Central Park views.

You can read James's entire article about what it's like to live in a historic New York building on the Post's website at http://nypost.com/2016/02/11/own-a-piece-of-history-with-these-nifty-ny-pads/

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Read more about NYC history in

 

Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

Postcard Thursday: The Lost Brennan Farmhouse where Poe Wrote "The Raven"

Edgar Allan Poe didn't live in New York City all that long, but he left an indelible stamp on the city. Of all the places he lived, only one still survives, Poe Cottage in the Bronx (subject of an earlier edition of Postcard Thursday). But today's postcard, which we acquired recently, depicts what is considered by many to be Poe's most important NYC residence -- the place where he wrote "The Raven."

As we write in Footprints in New York:

As [Poe's wife] Virginia’s tuberculosis worsened in 1844, the Poes took the only advice most doctors could give: move out of the city and get her into cleaner air.... [T]hey rented rooms from Patrick and Mary Brennan in “an old-fashioned, double-framed” farmhouse on the west side on what would eventually be 84th Street. The house was surrounded by 216 acres of woods. According to one of Poe’s earliest biographers, the family “received no visitors, and took their meals in their room by themselves.” Mrs. Brennan recalled Poe as a “shy, solitary, taciturn person, fond of rambling alone through the woods or of sitting on a favorite stump of a tree near the banks of the Hudson River.” In Poe’s era, Riverside Park had not been created, and the waterfront was not yet developed this far north. This meant Poe probably didn’t actually scramble all the way down the Hudson’s banks for his reveries; he watched the river drift by from the top of [a nearby outcropping of rock known as] Mount Tom.

courtesy of The Museum of the City of New York

The Poes’ room—unaltered until the house was torn down in 1888— was small but filled with light, having windows that faced the river on one side and the Brennans’ forest on the other. Years later, people who knew the house recollected that the Poes’ room was exactly like the chamber in “The Raven,” complete with the “pallid bust of Pallas” above the door. This may have been wishful thinking, but the house does seem, from photos and drawings, to have been a pleasant place. Pleasant enough, in retrospect, to make one almost forget the Poes’ straitened circumstances. Poe had difficulty making the rent. For much of his marriage, he had trouble putting food on the table. When Poe won a $225 judgment in a libel lawsuit, he used the money to buy some furnishings and a new suit; he could never afford to own more than one suit at a time, and the previous one was probably beyond repair.

Most inconveniently, the Brennan house’s distance from the city may have provided fresh air, but it also meant that any time Poe needed to meet with a publisher, he either had to take a stagecoach down the Bloomingdale Road—a costly inconvenience—or walk the ten miles round-trip.

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If don't follow us on Facebook (hint, hint), you might not have seen that James had an op-ed piece again this week in The Guardian, this one looking at the role Millard Fillmore played in the 1856 presidential election and whether Donald Trump will do the same in 2016. You can read it here.

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James was also interviewed by George Bodarky for WFUV's Cityscape about the origin of New York City private clubs. If you are in NYC, you can hear the interview when it is broadcast this Saturday, August 22, at 7:30 a.m. on 90.7FM. Those of you who are in other parts of the country can stream it or download the podcast at www.wfuv.org/cityscape

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Read our full chapter on Edgar Allan Poe in NYC in

Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers

If you haven't had a chance to pick up a copy of Footprints yet,

you can order it from your favorite online retailers (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc.) or

from independent bookstores across the country.

Pomander Walk

Photo by PilotGirl on flickr. 

Our friends over at Curbed published a nice map of New York's mews (mewses?) today, including one of our favorites, Pomander Walk. Though, as Curbed rightly notes, Pomander Walk isn't actually a mews because it never housed stables.

Pomander Walk was built in 1921-22 by Thomas J. Healy, a real estate developer and nightclub owner. When he acquired the lot between 94th and 95th Streets (near West End Avenue), Healy planned to put up a sixteen-story hotel. While waiting to raise the necessary capital for the project, Healy constructed this row of apartments (each house facade was originally designed to conceal two apartments, one upstairs and one downstairs) in a mock-Tudor style. He named it after Pomander Walk, a popular play that had opened on Broadway in 1910 and which was set on a similar, cute London Street. In truth, the Pomander Walk of the play was like many London terraces: every house was identical to its neighbor. To visualize what Pomander Walk probably should have looked like if Healy had been faithful to his source material, visit Washington Square North's "Row" between Fifth Avenue and University Place.

It was never Healy's intention to allow these apartments to stay; they were what's known as a "tax payer" -- properties designed to bring in enough revenue to pay the property taxes. As soon as Healy secured financing, these buildings were to be torn down and his hotel erected in their place. Healy, however, never moved forward with the hotel and charming Pomander Walk remains.

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Read more about New York's hidden nooks and crannies in

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

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Upper West Side Walking Tour this Sunday at 4PM

Just a friendly reminder that this Sunday, May 2, at 4:00 p.m., is our free walking tour of the Upper West Side sponsored by Borders. This will be a great opportunity to explore the neighborhood just north of Columbus Circle, including Lincoln Center and some of the important apartment buildings in the area. The tour will last somewhere between 60 and 90 minutes; we will end back at Borders for a Q&A and book singing.

The tour will meet at the Special Events Area of the Columbus Circle Borders (inside the Time Warner Center on the second floor). In order to make sure that we get started on time, please plan to be at the store by 3:50 p.m.

We look forward to seeing you there!

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Read more about the Upper West Side in

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

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Save The Date: Upper West Side Walking Tour + Book Signing on Sunday, May 2

Save the Date:
Sunday, May 2, 2010, at 4:00 p.m.

FREE EVENT

Following on our successful March walk in lower Central Park, we are returning to Borders, Columbus Circle, to lead a free walking tour of the part of the Upper West Side just outside their front door. We’ll talk about the history of Columbus Circle, walk up Broadway to Lincoln Center, and see some great residential architecture, too.

The tour will last between 60 and 90 minutes and will be followed by a Q&A and book signing back at the store.

Please meet at the Borders in the Time Warner Center, Columbus Circle, over in the special events area. In order to start on time, please plan to be there by 3:50PM at the latest.

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Read more about the Upper West Side in

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

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J.D. Salinger's Early Life on the West Side

J.D. Salinger on the cover of Time, 1961

Yesterday brought the sad news of the death of J.D. Salinger, author of the classic New York tale Catcher in the Rye.
The New York Times obit mentioned briefly that Salinger had been born in Harlem, so we decided to do a little digging and found that he'd been born just south of Trinity Cemetery at 3681 Broadway (at 153rd Street). The building, Halidon Court, was built in 1910 and designed by Emery Roth, who would later go on to build such famous Upper West Side edifices as the Eldorado and the Beresford -- and another of Salinger's future homes. This handsome building still stands.
The Salinger family moved within a year of J.D.'s birth to an apartment on the Upper West Side at 113th Street and Riverside Drive. According to biographer Paul Alexander, "between 1919 and 1928, the Salingers moved three more times before they ended up in a pleasant apartment on West Eighty-second Street."

That "pleasant" apartment was at the Myron Arms at 221 West 82nd Street, then a relatively new building, which had also been designed by Emery Roth. Though Salinger moved out of the neighborhood for the Upper East Side, Salinger later attended the McBurney School on West 64th Street for two years before flunking out. The McBurney School appears in Catcher in the Rye; it's the school to which the fencing team is heading when Holden leaves the foils on the subway. (The school later moved from West 64th Street and that original building no longer stands.)

The Myron Arms is still there, however -- just across the street from Barnes & Noble -- so if you're heading in that direction to replace your dog-eared copy of Catcher in the Rye or Nine Stories, take a moment to admire Salinger's boyhood home. 

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Read more about the Upper West Side -- and take a self-guided walking tour -- inInside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

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What's in a Name?: Lincoln Square

Glenn Collins at The New York Times posted an interesting blog entry today about the mystery surrounding the naming of Lincoln Center. The center, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary, is named for nearby Lincoln Square. But there seems to be no evidence to explain why this small triangle of land where Broadway and Columbus cross each other at 65th Street* was named in 1906 after President Lincoln. If, indeed, it was named after the Great Emancipator at all.

But we have a theory as to why there's a Lincoln Square. In March 1891, the next triangle of land north--where Amsterdam and Broadway cross at 70th Street--had been named for recently deceased Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman (who'd lived in a townhouse nearby). Soon the Sherman Square Hotel opened and, just a few blocks south, the Tecumseh apartments; Sherman Square quickly became a real draw and the center of the neighborhood.

As the new IRT subway began to bring residents to the Upper West Side in 1904, real estate development reached a fever pitch. It seems plausible that it was developers who pushed the city to rename the area around 65th Street Lincoln Square in an attempt to raise property values. They may have reasoned that if a Sherman Square was good, wouldn't a Lincoln Square be even better?

As Collins points out in his article, details are hard to track down. But we wouldn't be suprised if the answer turns out to be this real-estate one-upmanship.

* Lincoln Square the northern of the two triangles at this intersection; Dante Square is the name of the southern one.

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Much more about the Upper West Side and the city's propensity for renaming things can be found in our book, Inside the Apple.

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West Side Story

Opening on Broadway tonight is the eagerly anticipated revival of the Leonard Bernstein/Stephen Sondheim/Jerome Robbins musical West Side Story. (For a good analysis from one of the preview performances, check out Rob Snyder’s commentary over at the blog Greater New York.)

A couple of interesting facts about the musical:

•   When Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins first began discussing an adaption of Romeo and Juliet in the early 1950s, their first thought was to examine the tensions between Catholics and Jews on the Lower East Side. Early drafts were titled East Side Story and the action took place around Easter and Passover.
  
  
•  When the decision was made to concentrate instead on conflicts between the Puerto Rican immigrants who were coming to New York in great numbers, the action shifted to the west side neighborhood of San Juan Hill and West Side Story was born. Most of San Juan Hill was leveled to create the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, but prior to demolition some shots were taken for the opening of the 1961 film version of the musical.
  
  
• West Side Story was being written at the same time as Candide and Bernstein ended up swapping tunes between the two. According to sondheimguide.com, the melodies for “One Hand, One Heart” and “Gee, Officer Krupke,” were both lifted from Candide while a duet originally planned for Tony and Maria ended up in Candide as “Oh, Happy We.”

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Edgar Allan Poe at 200

Today, Edgar Allan Poe turns 200 years old. While he was born in Boston and died (under somewhat mysterious circumstances) in Baltimore, it should really be New York that has the greatest claim on the man. In his short life, Poe produced poetry, criticism, invented detective fiction, and mastered the horror story.

Celebrate his life in New York with a trip up to Edgar's Cafe at 255 West 84th Street, which sits on the site of what was once the author's Upper West Side farm. If it's not too cold, take a detour from the cafe over to Riverside Park. The large rock outcropping you see in the park between 82nd and 83rd Streets is Mount Tom, which is said to have been one of the places Poe went for inspiration. (The cafe has plenty of warm beverages to combat a cold visit to Mount Tom.)

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More about Poe in New York City will be featured in a future blog post--as well as in Inside the Apple.

Also, check out this link from the New York Times's Paper Cuts blog about Poe's work.

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