On this moment of writing it is still standing on the south of Washington Square.] Edgar Allan Poe lived with his sick young wife Virginia, on Carmine Street, and lived very uncomfortably, too.

The name of his boarding-house keeper is lost to posterity, but the poet wrote of her food: "I wish Kate our cat could see it.

She would faint." Poor Poe lived always somewhere near the Square.

Once in a while he moved away for a time, but he invariably gravitated back to it and to his old friends there.

It was in Carmine Street that he wrote his "Arthur Gordon Pym," with Gowans the publisher for a fellow lodger; it was on Sixth Avenue and Waverly Place that he created "Ligeia" and "The Fall of the House of Usher." After Virginia's death, he took a room just off the Square, and wrote the "Imp of the Perverse," with her picture (it is said) above his desk.