The Poe Pilgrimage

A.N. Devers, for Tin House, visits Poe's house in Baltimore.

From the story...

When I gave the address of the Poe House, 203 N. Amity Street, to my taxi driver, he repeated it several times, muttering to himself as if he didn’t mean for me to hear him. Then he asked for the address again. Thinking he didn’t know his way, I unfolded my tourist map of Baltimore and tried to make sense of it.

“Are you sure you want to go there?” he asked.

“It’s the Edgar Allan Poe House,” I said. “Funny, it’s not on this map.”

“That’s because they don’t want you to go there.”

I thought to myself, who are they? “Is it near his grave? I see the grave on the map.”

“It’s OK,” the driver said, “I know how to go. It’s not far from the grave, but you wouldn’t want to walk there.”

Before my visit, I knew little about Baltimore’s Poe House. That was because I didn’t want to know too much; I wanted to see it with untarnished eyes. So I didn’t know that the Poe House was located inside the boundaries of the Poe Homes, the city’s oldest housing projects. Nor did I know that the projects were built on the remains of historic homes that were controversially demolished in the 1930s. It was a last-minute public outcry that spared Poe’s house itself from the bulldozer. A couple of weeks after my Baltimore visit I sat down to watch the first episode of The Wire. Twenty minutes into the show, two homicide detectives discuss the discovery of a John Doe in West Baltimore:

McNulty: Hey, it’s a decomp. Maybe it comes back a natural death.

Landsman: You think?

McNulty: In the Poe Homes, no fucking way.