This is the cottage at its original site (Grand Concourse & E Kingsbridge Rd), before it was moved. Like the Hamilton’s home, the house was put on logs and moved over a couple blocks. The cottage is very small and humble –representative of how the lower class lived during the nineteenth century. The home was unheated and thus quite miserable in the colder months. One of Poe’s friends described it thusly: “The cottage had an air of taste and gentility… So neat, so poor, so unfurnished, and yet so charming a dwelling I never saw.”
This is the cottage at its present site (the north end of Poe Park). Here, it became an official city landmark in 1966. Today it is administered by the Bronx County Historical Society. While the structure of the house remains mainly the same, much of the inside has been slightly renovated for preservation purposes. Similarly, much of the furniture and pieces inside the home are period pieces, rather than the actual pieces the Poe’s kept in their home.
This image depicts Fordham Village, Bronx in 1800 (around 20 years after the cottage was built). At the time, the village was mostly countryside and small farms. There were a few homes, one hotel, two taverns and a blacksmith shop.
This is an image of Fordham Village today. You can see the the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage nestled at the top of Poe Park. Today, the area is well-populated with hardly any free land. It is no longer a countryside that you cannot reach via public transportation but rather a bustling and connected part of the city.
-Laura James, Arianna Injeian, Robert Mayo
Bios:
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