Chapter VIII
Those Who Gathered about Poe
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 farmhouses 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 tombstones 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 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 Horseshoe 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 through the nearby 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 bookseller 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 Waverley 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.