Edgar Allan Poe Cottage

Poe Cottage stands in the northern part of Poe Park, in the Fordham neighborhood of the Bronx. The house is believed to have been built in 1797. In 1913 it was moved a short distance from its original site on Kingsbridge Road to the park where it stands now.

When Edgar Allan Poe, his wife Virginia and her mother Maria moved in around May 1846, Fordham was a rural community only recently linked to the city by rail, and not yet part of the Bronx. The house was small and plain: a sitting room and a kitchen on the first floor, and an unheated upper floor with a bedroom and Poe’s study. The family kept caged songbirds on the front porch.

Visitors of the time described a poor, tidy home with an air of refinement, and Maria later remembered it as the sweetest little cottage she could imagine.

Poe wrote “Annabel Lee” and “Ulalume” in this house, and he published his series “The Literati of New York City” while he lived here. He also became friendly with the Jesuit faculty of the nearby college, now Fordham University, whose church bells inspired his poem “The Bells.”

It was also a house of grief. Virginia had tuberculosis and died in the first-floor bedroom on January 30, 1847. Poe died in Baltimore on October 7, 1849, and Maria did not hear of it until two days later, after he had been buried. She moved out soon afterward.

The house later fell into disrepair. It was sold at auction in 1889, and in 1895 the New York Shakespeare Society bought it as a headquarters. Writers and public figures argued for saving it, the state authorized money in 1905 to restore it and create a park, and the cottage was dedicated in Poe Park on November 13, 1913. It became a city landmark in 1966, the Bronx County Historical Society has administered it since 1975, and a visitor center opened in the park in 2008.