Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll look at the manuscript of “For Annie,” a poem that Edgar Allan Poe wrote when he lived in a cottage in the Bronx. Annie was married, but that didn’t stop him. We’ll also look at a report that found “big gaps” in the way City Hall prepares for extreme weather.
Also, so you know: New York Today will focus on what’s going on in New York this week — aside from the trial of former President Donald Trump. We’ll summarize the developments in our Latest New York News section, and you can also sign up to receive our Trump on Trial newsletter.
“This is a very special moment,” Richard Austin said, leaning over a yellowed sheet of paper that had been placed on a writing desk — a now-faded original manuscript of a famous poem by Edgar Allan Poe, “For Annie.”
Austin, the head of books and manuscripts at Sotheby’s, was standing in a stark, white room at the Poe Cottage on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, where Poe lived when he wrote “For Annie.”
Sotheby’s expects the page to sell for $400,000 to $600,000 in June. That would have been an unimaginable sum for Poe, who was so poor when he lived in the cottage that his mother-in-law “resorted to digging up the turnips meant for the cattle,” one Poe biographer wrote. His wife’s mother, Maria Clemm, also gathered dandelions “and other greens” for salads.
Poe had moved there in 1846 with his ailing wife, Virginia, and Clemm. “The hope was that the country would improve Virginia’s health and her husband’s battered psyche,” Mark Dawidziak wrote in the 2023 biography “A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe.”
But Virginia died of tuberculosis in 1847 — the bed in which she died is in a little room beyond the one where the “For Annie” manuscript had been laid out. Austin said that the page with “For Annie” had not been back at the Poe Cottage since 1849, when Poe sent it off to an editor, hoping it would be published. (It was.)
Poe also wrote “The Bells,” “Eureka” and “Annabel Lee” while living in the cottage, which he had rented for $100 a year, or $8.33 a month. “The equivalent of $3,000 a year now,” said Roger McCormack, the director of education for the Bronx County Historical Society, which maintains the cottage.
It was “so neat, so poor, so unfurnished and yet so charming” when Poe lived there, one visitor wrote after stopping by. (McCormack said the cottage had been across the street when Poe lived in it. It was moved into what is now Poe Park in 1913, according to the Department of Parks and Recreation.)
When the High Bridge opened in 1848, “it became a pacing and thinking place for Poe, who, day and night, might be spotted on the grass causeway” atop the structure, Dawidziak wrote.
He was aware of his “gloomy ‘Raven Man’ image,” Dawidziak wrote, but some found him surprisingly cheerful — “a very handsome and elegant-appearing gentleman,” according to Mary Bronson, who visited Poe in 1847. And he made friends with leaders of nearby St. John’s College, which had been founded a few years before and is now Fordham University. They “smoked, drank and played cards like gentlemen, and never said a word about religion.”
So who was Annie?
Her name was Nancy Richmond. She was married and lived in Massachusetts. She had met Poe when he gave a reading in Boston.
She was not the only woman Poe was infatuated with after his wife’s death. “Only his powerful involvement, later on, with Sarah Helen Whitman served to eclipse Mrs. Richmond,” one account noted. Whitman was a wealthy widow whose family worried that Poe was interested only in her money.
As if that were not complicated enough, when things cooled with Whitman, he pursued a widow he had known when they were children.
But he never really got over Annie. At one point he implored her to visit him at the cottage. “I feel I CANNOT live, unless I can feel your sweet, gentle, loving hand pressed upon my forehead,” he wrote.
Poe was proud of “For Annie.” “I think the lines for Annie much the best I have ever written,” he said. (As Austin pointed out, “If you’re trying to woo someone, you’re not going to say, ‘I’m not sending you my best.”)
But Poe also noted that “an author can seldom depend on his own estimate of his own works — so I wish to know what my Annie truly thinks of them.”
Richmond officially changed her first name to Annie after Poe died.
Weather
Look for a sunny day with temperatures in the low 60s and a light breeze. The evening will turn cooler and cloudy, with temperatures in the low 50s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
Suspended today and tomorrow (Passover).
The latest New York news
The Trump Trial
Opening statements and a first witness: The hush-money trial of Donald Trump began with opening statements from lawyers for both sides. The first witness was the longtime publisher of The National Enquirer, David Pecker.
What the lawyers said: A prosecutor, Matthew Colangelo, began by telling jurors that Trump had conspired with his former fixer, Michael Cohen, and David Pecker to conceal damaging stories during the 2016 campaign. Trump’s lead lawyer, Todd Blanche, said that Trump’s actions had been normal and legal.
If Trump testifies: Justice Juan Merchan ruled that prosecutors could ask Trump about previous cases that he had lost, as well as past violations of gag orders, if he testified.
No video allowed: New York courts generally do not permit video to be broadcast from courtrooms, so there will be no televised video feed from the trial. Nor will there be an audio feed, as some federal courts allow.
More Local News
Campus protests: Around the campus of Columbia University on Monday, a day of protests held under perfect blue skies just hours before the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Passover, the sentiment shared by nearly everyone was anger at the university’s president, Nemat Shafik.
An eight-foot setback: One man’s ideas about city life in the 19th century made things difficult for would-be developers in a $180 million deal in Brooklyn.
More funding needed: Trauma recovery centers help victims of violent crime, particularly in low-income communities. With city budget cuts looming, centers in Coney Island, East Flatbush and the Bronx are already struggling to stay afloat, the columnist Ginia Bellafante writes.
‘Big gaps’ in how City Hall handles emergency preparations
A report by the New York City comptroller’s office found “big gaps” in the way City Hall handles emergency preparations for extreme weather, like the storms that inundated New York City with more than eight inches of rain last September.
The report found that only 19 of the Department of Environmental Protection’s 51 specialized catch-basin cleaning trucks had been available — the other 32 were out of service. The trucks are a key part of the city’s toolbox for preventing floods.
The report also said the city’s communications with the public were lacking.
The mayor did not hold a news conference about the storm until nearly three hours after the heavy rains had begun. The Department of Education did not directly communicate “any information” to students’ families about the weather in advance of the storm, according to the comptroller.
While the city’s opt-in emergency alert system sent out notices, most New Yorkers do not subscribe to the flash-flood warnings: “Only 2.7 percent of New Yorkers over 16 years of age (185,895 people) received Notify NYC emergency alerts for the flash flood event on Sept. 29,” according to the report.
METROPOLITAN diary
Strawberry spill
Dear Diary:
I was biking across West 15th Street on my way home from the Union Square Greenmarket. I had a flat of ripe strawberries attached to the back of my bike with a bungee cord.
I was planning to make strawberry conserve for everyone who had helped me through my recent chemotherapy.
I didn’t notice the pothole until it was too late. Strawberries went flying, and I ran into the street to retrieve them.
The driver of a black S.U.V. behind me also hit the brakes, blocking traffic as I gathered up my errant berries. Then my bike tipped over, and quarts of strawberries sprayed across the pavement.
As I grabbed my helmet, a woman on the sidewalk offered to hold my bike steady while I scooped up the berries. She couldn’t stay long, she explained, because she was waiting for an air-conditioner to be delivered.
Just then, the air-conditioner man got out of his van on the other side of the street and came over to help. The S.U.V. driver continued to block traffic until all the berries were back in their boxes.
I thanked my strawberry Samaritans profusely and pedaled home, where I washed the berries and made eight cups of jam.
— Catherine Fredman
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Geordon Wollner, Dana Rubinstein and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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The post When Edgar Allan Poe Lived, and Loved, in the Bronx appeared first on New York Times.