Edgar Allan Poe Street

You are currently walking on a stretch of West 84th Street that carries the honorary title of Edgar Allan Poe Street. The city designated this name in 1980 to honor the time the writer lived here in 1844, when this part of the city was still rolling, sparsely populated farmland. Poe moved to this remote corner of Manhattan to escape the high rent costs he faced in the more settled downtown neighborhoods. He lived with his wife, Virginia, and his mother-in-law in a farmhouse owned by the Brennan family. It was in a room within that farmhouse, surrounded by a landscape that looked nothing like the dense residential streets of today, that he completed his most famous poem, The Raven.