Earlier this month the Rag asked (and answered) What Do You Have to Do to Have a Street Named After You? We also invited readers to ask us about the stories behind the names on Upper West Side streets. Today we’ve got the story of Edgar Allan Poe on the UWS. Poe lived here nearly two centuries ago, when the neighborhood was farmland, and the rural surroundings helped inspire the writing of his brooding masterpiece, The Raven. Send us a note at info@westsiderag.com to suggest what street sign we should investigate next time.

By Allison Moon

I grew up two blocks away from Edgar Allan Poe Street on the Upper West Side. I liked to imagine the entire block as a gothic horror scene, swarms of ravens circling the sky (a flock of ravens is called an unkindness), and knotted vines stretching up the walls of Upper West Side apartments. In reality it looked the same as every other UWS block – a couple of pre-war apartment buildings and a charming row of brownstones.

During lower school, we read aloud The Raven in late October, just in time for Halloween. I still remember the way that the rhythmic beat and tidy lines of poetry contrasted with its subject matter, which was intensely psychological, filled with the type of pain that can only come from the ache of loss. The poem features a mind wrestling with grief, unfurling and descending into the depths of madness as Poe himself sits in the claustrophobic confines of his chamber, mourning the loss of Lenore (presumably modeled after his wife, Virginia, who at the time was battling the tuberculosis that eventually took her life).

In the poem, Poe repeatedly hears a knocking on his door that leads nowhere; his true visitor is an “ebony bird,” which flies inside to perch “upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door.” Its role? To remind him that his grief will never disappear – “nevermore.”

Poe has long been associated with Baltimore, where he died in 1849, was buried, and where his final home is now a National Historic Landmark. But he lived and worked for years in New York. More than that, the West 84th Street block that also bears his name (between Riverside Drive and Broadway) is where he wrote most of The Raven nearly two centuries ago.

It takes some serious imagination to envision what the area looked like when Poe lived there in 1844-45, in what was known as the Brennan Farmhouse. The house was bought by Patrick Brennan in 1830, who lived there with his wife Mary Elizabeth and their six children. Poe, his wife, Virginia, and her mother, Maria Clemm, rented space on the second floor.

Just like today, nabbing a rental in Manhattan was not an easy process. Poe had moved to the Upper West Side area to escape high rents around Washington Square, (where he’d lived at 113 ½ Carmine Street and at Sixth Avenue and Waverly Place). He and his wife were also seeking a reprieve from the busy streets of downtown – in search of cleaner air and wide open spaces.

Though it may be hard to picture today, Poe must have found what he was looking for with the Brennans. Their house, part of a 216-acre farm, overlooked land towards the Hudson River that was dotted with ponds, hills, and dense forest. The streets surrounding it were unpaved, and its location was about midway between the river and Bloomingdale Road, modern-day Broadway.

Its surroundings facilitated Poe’s mental and physical wanderings. Martha, one of the Brennan daughters, described Poe as a “shy, solitary, taciturn sort of man, fond of rambling down in the woods, between the house and the river, and sitting for hours under a certain stump on the edge of the bank of the river.”

This would be the mid 19th-century equivalent of putting your emails on hold and grabbing a cup of Joe’s Coffee, taking a brisk walk around the Upper West Side with a dog in tow, maybe even finding a smidge of greenery in the canopy of elms in Riverside Park.

Another observer of Poe at the Brennan house said that “It was Poe’s custom to wander away from the House in pleasant weather to ‘Mount Tom’ an immense rock which may still be seen in Riverside Park, where he would sit silently for hours gazing out at the Hudson.” Poe’s ‘Mount Tom, which he named after Patrick Brennan’s young son, can still be found today at the end of West 83rd Street and Riverside, and is, in my experience, a popular spot for picnickers as well as a natural jungle gym for children. One observer added that “other days [Poe] would roam through the surrounding woods and returning in the afternoon, sit in the ‘big room,’ as it used to be called, by a window and work unceasingly with pen and paper until the evening shadows.”

Poe did not garner critical acclaim until the release of The Raven in May 1846. He lived in 10 or more locations throughout Manhattan and the Bronx, and spent most of his time working in journalism while in New York. In his “Doings of Gotham” column for the Columbia Spy, he wrote that “I have been roaming far and wide over this island of Manhattan. Some portions of its interior have a certain air of rocky sterility which may impress some imaginations as simply dreary — to me it conveys the sublime.” On the people of New York: “​The city is thronged with strangers, and everything wears an aspect of intense life,” though the streets, he wrote, were, “with rare exception, insufferably dirty.” He also mourned the changes that were beginning to transform the city from sprawling farmland to urban grid.

“In some thirty years every noble cliff will be a pier,” Poe wrote, “and the whole island will be densely desecrated by buildings of brick, with portentous facades of brown-stone, or brown-stonn, as the Gothamites have it.”

From Brennan Farmhouse, the Poes moved north to Fordham (now the Bronx), to a small cottage, where Virginia died in 1847. Soon after, Poe moved to Baltimore where he died in 1849, likely from alcoholism (but recent speculation about the cause of death being rabies has popped up).

The mythology of Poe on the Upper West Side has long served as an object of fascination for residents, as well as a modest opportunity for profit (remember Edgar’s Café?). But for all the attention, some of the facts remain fuzzy – like the exact location of the Brennan Farmhouse, which was demolished in 1888 (a black wooden mantelpiece from it was rescued and resides in Columbia University’s rare book and manuscript library, where it’s referred to as the “Raven Mantle,” the one the infamous raven allegedly perched on when talking to Poe).

The city sign proclaiming Edgar Allan Poe Street, put up in 1980, sits on the block of West 84th Street, from Riverside Drive to Broadway. But a plaque, funded by the New York Shakespeare Society, places the farmhouse west of Broadway and 84th. The other plaque, on the Eagle Court Apartment Building, claims the farmhouse existed on the east side of Broadway and 84th Street.

Then there was the series of typos – glaring ones. In 1980, when the sign was first instituted, the middle name of Poe’s was misspelled – “Allen,” not “Allan,” it read. It was quickly corrected after residents took notice. But then it somehow happened again. In 1997, as reported by the New York Times, an Upper West Side resident noticed that the street sign on the northwest corner of 84th Street and West End Avenue read “Edgar Allen Poe,” misspelling his middle name. This was made even more perplexing by the fact that on the southwest corner of West End Avenue, a second sign correctly read “Edgar Allan Poe Street.” This more recent mistake – Round 2 – has since been corrected.

Breathing easier knowing that any defective spellings of Poe’s name are “nevermore,” I’ll let my morning walks past 84th Street remind me of a certain farmhouse, and a certain pioneering writer whose work on the Upper West Side spelled a story of tragedy, but also fit the time-old paradigm of a struggling young writer in New York City just trying to get his foot in the door. Poe ends his poem with a remarkable stanza on permanence. “And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting/On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;/…And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor /Shall be lifted—nevermore!”

Can you still feel Poe, the poet of Brennan Farmhouse, in these transformed 21st century UWS streets?