The other day when I was checking out Books of Wonder's new West 84th Street location, I remembered that this was the block where Edgar Allan Poe wrote "The Raven" in the 1840s.
There's an excellent post at manhattanpast.com that lays out the evidence for where the farmhouse was located. Suffice it to say that when the city laid out West 84th Street, they sliced right through the hillside, creating the odd effect of the house on a bluff. (It was more of a rolling hillside when Poe lived there.)
My contribution is the photo of what it looks like now.
The farmhouse was eventually razed and the hillside flattened, almost certainly to make way for the turn-of-the-century buildings that currently occupy the spot. A movie theater now occupies the space to the right, where the stairs were.
It's a bit mind-blowing, isn't it?
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