Edgar Allan Poe’s Upper West Side farmhouse

Edgar Allan Poe—arguably New York City’s first Bohemian—lived in a bunch of different places when he arrived in Manhattan in the 1830s.

There was a home at 130 Greenwich Street, another at 85 West Third (or Amity) Street, and a cottage on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, where his young wife Virginia died of tuberculosis in 1846.

In 1844, fleeing high rents near Washington Square, he and Virginia moved to a farmhouse near today’s West 84th Street and Broadway.

Of course, there was no city up there, as this early 1900s postcard reveals.

Manhattan was country north of Greenwich Village, dotted with tiny hamlets.

Interestingly, the postcard calls Broadway “St. Nicholas Place.” I found one reference to that forgotten street name: a New York Times piece from 1893:

“The house where ‘The Raven’ was written stands on a rocky and commanding eminence, a few hundred feet from the corner of 84th Street and St. Nicholas Boulevard, formerly the Bloomingdale Road,” the Times reported.

This corner today claims Poe as its own, naming 84th Street from Broadway through West End Avenue after him and honoring the famous resident with a long-running cafe, Edgar’s.

Tags: Bohemians in New York City, Edgar Allan Poe 84th Street, Edgar Allan Poe in New York City, Edgar Allan Poe wife Virginia, Edgar's Cafe 84th Street, New York City poets, New York City writers, Poe Cottage Bronx, Poe Farmhouse Upper West Side, Poe house West Third Street, Upper West Side writers