Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [557]
Poe was no fan of cities. They connoted heartless commercialism, poverty, pollution, and crime. He loved upper Manhattan and often rambled its woods and streams but believed the area “doomed.” Soon it would be withered by the “acrid breath” of “the spirit of Improvement,” its waterfronts lined with “nothing more romantic than shipping, warehouses, and wharves.”
Disdainful but needy, Poe plunged into New York’s expanding publishing world. Soon after arriving, he sold Moses Beach’s Sun a hoax he’d concocted about an Atlantic balloon crossing. Then he landed a spot at the Evening Mirror run by Willis and Morris. Hiking each day from the farm to Nassau Street, he scribbled anonymous filler for fifteen dollars a week, helping turn out a magazine he thought “frivolous and fashionable.” He did hackwork for other presses too, including a “Doings of Gotham” series for a small-town Pennsylvania paper.
In his tales, however, Poe was forging new ways to read the city. “The Man of the Crowd,” published in Graham’s Magazine in 1840, recounted the story of a balked flaneur. The narrator lounges in a London coffeehouse, observing the street scene, sorting passersby into familiar categories. Suddenly he sees an old man whom he can’t place, whose behavior challenges his ability to read and interpret the crowd. Leaping up, he follows his quarry through the metropolis, without stopping, for over twenty-four hours. He discovers that the old man drives himself ceaselessly through the streets out of terror that if he stopped he would have to confront his own emptiness. The flaneur’s confidence in civic legibility, Poe suggests, is shallow and misplaced. Crowds and cities are indecipherable.
A subsequent trio of tales, published in Philadelphia magazines between 1841 and 1843, extended and deepened this approach. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” and “The Purloined Letter” all presented cities teeming with activity and possibility (as did the flaneurs) yet shot through with crime and random violence (as did the mysteries). “Marie Rogêt,” putatively set in a Paris described as “odious” and a “sink of pollution,” was in fact based on the death of Mary Rogers in New York City. Rogers’s fate symbolized for Poe the vulnerability of city folk, how easily one could go missing and turn up a brutalized corpse. Yet Poe solved Marie’s “mystery” by introducing an analytical investigator, C. Auguste Dupin, who acknowledged what flaneurs denied: that the city was hard to read, dangerous, even terrifying. Dupin is no amateur idler but a credentialed specialist, a master of the skills of decoding a cityscape. Poe had invented a genre—the detective story—that played upon but in the end relieved his readers’ urban anxieties. Social order was possible after all, Poe implied, if authorities adopted scientific methods of investigation and control. The detective, embodiment of this reassuring message, became a fixture on the urban literary scene.
So did Poe. Hoping to improve his chances of starting a magazine, he tried to get Harpers to publish his tales, but it turned him down. Then, in “the bleak December” of 1844, he wrote “The Raven,” a shivery poem ideal for reading aloud, which Willis published in January 1845 to uproarious acclaim. Buoyed by overnight fame, Poe renewed his efforts to launch a journal. He moved back to the city in early 1845 and perched, variously, on Greenwich Street, East Broadway, and Amity Street near Washington Square during the coming year.
Poe wrote a piece, which Willis published, called “WHY HAVE THE NEW YORKERS NOREVIEW?” In it, he proposed establishing a “proper indigenous vehicle” for rallying Manhattan’s literati against derisive Boston intellectuals. Charles Briggs did just