Never bet the devil your head,
said Edgar Allan Poe and he would know.
--Tom Devaney
The Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site in Philadelphia may be one of the most interesting museums in the world because there’s nothing in it. The house on the corner of 7th and Spring Garden, once Edgar Allan Poe’s residence, is completely empty. Hence, it’s a space that requires you to engage and use your imagination.
As part of the Institute of Contemporary Art’s summer survey in 2004, “The Big Nothing,” a city-wide exploration of nothing and nothingness, I led an imaginative tour through the Poe House for two weekends in June. Visitors on “The Empty House Tour” were encouraged to explore the empty space of the house, phantom black cats, walled-in windows, surprise-whispers, and nothingness.
Poe rented the house, his “rose-covered cottage,” from 1843-1844. Famously nomadic, Poe lived in five different houses during his six years in Philadelphia; this is, however, the only one still in existence. Poe lived there with his teenage wife Virginia and her mother Maria Clemm.
Poe lived in Philadelphia during his years of greatest productivity -- writing over 380 of his 600 items when he lived in the city. During his stay at the house, he wrote some of his most famous works, including “The Black Cat,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.”
In Poe’s room tour-goers sat on the hardwood floor and I briefly talked about Poe’s sense of rhythm and the spells some of his more famous poems such as “The Raven” and “The Bells” create. While we were in his room I taught the tour-goers to sing a tune (kind of a lullaby) to the letters A-L-O-N-E and then I asked them to sing the tune very softly as I read Poe’s poem “Alone” over the lush whispering of A-L-O-N-E.
Leading tours in the cellar, I discussed the story of “The Black Cat.” The park rangers told me that visitors on the tours sometimes claim to be direct decedents of Edgar Allan Poe, who had no children. Today, Poe lives only through his work. However, if you hang around this neighborhood, it’s clear that his cat Catterina’s offspring continue to abound in the Spring Garden area.
In another room, where Poe’s fragile wife Virginia convalesced, visitors explored the “intermediate consciousness preceding sleep,” that is, the hynogogic state on the brink of sleep which plays a part in so many of Poe’s tales.
The Poe House was donated to the City of Philadelphia by Colonel Richard Gimbel, one of the world’s leading rare-book and manuscript collectors and heir to Philadelphia’s Gimbels Department Store fortune. His world-class collection of Poe-related items includes the only known copy of “The Raven” hand-written by Poe, and the manuscripts for “Annabel Lee” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”
Gimbel purchased the house and the surrounding city block in 1933. He tore down most of the other properties on the block and turned Poe’s house into a museum and storage space for his enormous Edgar Allan Poe collection. One of Colonel Gimbel’s unrealized goals was to make Philadelphia Poe-conscious. He said, “Before I die I hope to make Poe and Philadelphia synonymous.”
Tom Devaney is the author of Letters to Ernesto Neto (Germ Folios, 2004). He is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is coordinator of the Kelly Writers House and produces the monthly radio show “Live” on 88.5-FM WXPN.
