Edgar Allan Poe’s Last Home in NYC
Edgar Allan Poe’s last home in New York was at 17 West 10th Street. In May 1848, at the house, Dr. Shew allowed the poet to live in one of his rooms and to court his widowed sister, Mrs. Marie Louise Shew. She had nursed Poe’s dying wife in the Bronx until she had died and had made the funeral arrangements. Mrs. Marie Louise Shew, an Episcopalian, sometimes took Poe to Church with her. Sometimes Poe brought her to Charlotte Lynch’s literary salon where he sometimes read his poetry and met other writers and publishers at 116 Waverly Place.
Poe had a genuine and deep affection for Mrs. Shew and her for him at one point. However, she decided not want to marry him. In this break off, she was to some extent prompted by a young student of theology, John Henry Hopkins, Jr. who was horrified at a pantheistic tendency in Eureka and feared that Mrs. Shew’s orthodoxy might be shaken by the author of that recondite treatise. He reported this to her brother the doctor who convinced her immortal soul was in danger if she continued the romance. Teleport — https://teleport-city.com/2013/10/29/terrifying-tales/ reports “where he reportedly lived when he had his heart broken by a rejected marriage proposal.”
Gordon Linzner, a tour guide in my employee, reports, “I can’t find my references for this information — as I recall it took me a couple of days at least to track it down — but it seems that although Poe visited #17 he never lived there, and the house numbers along West 10th Street changed sometime mid-19th century so the actual #17 may well have been over by University Place. In any case, the current #17 only dates back to 1900. “
Ghosts of New York Blog 3 Edgar Allan Poe’s Last Home and Haunted Location in New York City is an Urban Legend © 2017 by Dr. Philip Ernest Schoenberg, Ghost with a Blog #ghost