fed an increasing influx of ‘strangers’ into the city from points abroad as well as the surrounding countryside.”29
Despite this turmoil, the six years that Poe lived in Philadelphia also saw a vibrant arts community emerge at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Early in the 1830s, the Academy almost closed for financial reasons; however, a year before the Great Panic of 1837, it had recovered and had enough economic leeway to buy Benjamin West’s Death on the Pale Horse. This purchase caused a lively debate among local artists who felt that not enough of their own work was being shown at the Academy. The Academy listened, and the result was a move toward the exhibition of American art and away from European artists’ works. The Academy’s website provides the following overview of this period: “While the local artists sought participation in the institution’s management and exhibition planning, the affluent gentlemen board members—many descendants of the City’s founding elite—were more concerned with the diffusion of cultivated taste to the public. Ultimately both sides gained small victories: the academy focused increasingly on American art and the board remained in the control of laymen city leaders.”30
After Poe’s six-year stay in Philadelphia, he returned to Manhattan with his wife, Virginia, and mother-in-law, Mrs. Clemm, in April 1844. For a short time, Poe had been relatively free of debt because of his successful petition in December 1842 under the 1841 Bankruptcy Act. His bankruptcy petition released him from more than two thousand dollars in financial obligations to numerous people.31 The New York that Poe found was likewise a much more prosperous place than it had been when he lived there briefly in 1837. By 1844, New York had recovered from the great fire of 1835 and the economic panic of 1837. The city’s population had grown by 75 percent; nonetheless, most commerce and residences were still concentrated below Fourteenth Street. What is now Central Park then housed what Eric Homberger describes in Scenes from the Life of a City as “squatter encampments.”32 Evidencing Poe’s influence in so many disciplines, Homberger enhanced his description of this area of New York with an excerpt from Poe’s first installment of “Doings of Gotham,” a series of letters he contributed to the Pottsville, Pennsylvania, newspaper Columbia Spy right after his move to New York: “I have been roaming far and wide over this island of Mannahatta. Some portions of its interior have a certain air of rocky sterility which may impress some imaginations as simply dreary—to me it conveys the sublime. Trees are few; but some of the shrubbery is exceedingly picturesque.”33
During this stay in New York, Poe saw its first railroad being built; completed in 1846, it extended from City Hall twenty-seven miles to White Plains. By that same year, the first telegraph line connected New York with Philadelphia.34 These new communication resources indicate a thriving and prosperous city. Wealthy merchants such as Jonathan Sturges and Charles Leupp had both the time and the money to patronize the arts, and they did. Not surprisingly, as a result, a growing number of artists began to settle in New York, and its visual arts scene rapidly expanded. The New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts, the city’s first permanent-exhibit art gallery, was founded in 1844, and both the National Academy of Design (dedicated to the display of American artworks) and the American Art-Union (dedicated to the sale of American artists’ works) enjoyed marked profits from the substantial increase in attendance at their exhibits during these important years.35 In fact, more people than ever before were exposed to the arts because the New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts and the American Art-Union provided access to their galleries for little or no charge. The former charged a minimum entrance fee, while the latter was committed to being a “free Picture Gallery, always open and well attended.”36
This was an exciting time for the arts in New York, and Poe enjoyed a similar excitement in his career. During these two years, he gained great celebrity, became the owner of his own literary magazine, and lived in the most fashionable part of town near Washington Square Park at 85 Amity Street. His time in Manhattan was punctuated by two dramatic literary events: one when he first arrived—the self-proclaimed enthusiastic response to his article “The Balloon Hoax”—and the other early the next year with the publication of “The Raven.”
One week after he arrived in New York, Poe’s “Balloon Hoax” was issued as a one-page broadside by the Sun, followed two days later by publication in Mordecai Noah’s Sunday Times. “The Balloon-Hoax” created quite a stir, if we can believe Poe’s account in his column in the Columbia Spy of May 21, 1844: “On the morning (Saturday) of its announcement, the whole square surrounding the ‘Sun’ building was literally besieged, blocked up—ingress and egress being alike impossible, from a period soon after sunrise until about two o-clock P.M. . . . I never witnessed more intense excitement to get possession of a newspaper.”37 Whether this level of excitement actually occurred could be questioned; nonetheless, Poe unabashedly promoted this “premier” publication in his new hometown of “Mannahatta.”
The other pivotal event that pushed Poe into the limelight was the publication of “The Raven.” The poem was met with lavish praise, and as a result Poe enjoyed months of celebrity. He was invited to soirees at 116 Waverly Place, the home of poet and socialite Anne Lynch (fig. 3), where he had many opportunities to talk with writers and artists such as Margaret Fuller, Frances Osgood, N. P. Willis, and Horace Greeley. I was struck by the curious Poe-like coincidence that I discovered by coordinating the notes in the Poe Log describing both Poe’s dramatic reading of “The Raven” at Miss Lynch’s home on the evening of July 19, 1845, and the great fire of that year, which broke out on the same day. The New-York Mirror’s description of the night of the fire—“The moon light falls upon the ruins which are still burning to some extent, and gives a wild and unnatural aspect to the whole scene”—suggests a particularly eerie setting for Poe’s recitation. While lower Manhattan smoldered and the moon was full, Poe read “The Raven” to the eager listeners at the Lynch soiree. The setting surely enhanced his performance, described by Miss Lynch as “electrifying” (Poe Log, 553). Not only did this reading increase Poe’s popularity and reinforce the reputation he had for his mesmerizing reading style, but the drama that surrounded the event must have intensified the recitation’s lasting effect on its audience. Before sunrise the next day, the worst fire since the great fire of 1835 had raged throughout many streets in lower Manhattan.
Although fires had been a constant concern for New Yorkers since the city was founded, the completion of the Croton Aqueduct in 1842 promised to lessen the chance that a major fire like the one in 1835 could reoccur. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Even with the abundant water supply provided by the aqueduct and the work of a more efficient fire department, the 1845 fire destroyed more than three hundred buildings and killed thirty people. In his diary, George Templeton Strong describes the fire, which began, according to his account of Saturday, July 19, at “half-past three this morning by a couple of explosions in quick succession that shook the house like an earthquake and must have blown me out of bed. . . . The moon was shining full and bright; the dawn just beginning to show itself, and to the southeast there rose into the air a broad column of intense red flame that made the moon look pale.”38
The weekly edition of the New-York Mirror for Saturday, July 26, 1845, began its account of the fire with this claim:
We are called upon to record a dire calamity, equaled only by that which visited the city in 1835. . . . At about 4 o-clock it communicated to the store of Crocker & Warner, in New Street, in which was stored a huge quantity of salt petre, which blew up with an explosion that shook the city like an earthquake. . . . SATURDAY—MIDNIGHT—The scene at this hour is awfully sublime. The moon light falls upon the ruins which are still burning to some extent, and gives a wild and unnatural aspect to the whole scene.