Fiscal Woe Haunting Baltimore Poe House
The Edgar Allan Poe home and museum in Baltimore may close due to lack of funds.� Tony Tsendeas, a local actor, portrays Poe and manages the house occasionally.
By KATE TAYLOR
Published: August 7, 2011
BALTIMORE ? Even now, 162 years after his death here, Edgar Allan Poe still seems to be suffering from the kind of bad luck that haunted his life.
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For a second year city leaders have chosen not to subsidize a museum in the tiny house where the impoverished Poe lived from around 1833 to 1835, a decision that means it may have to close soon.
Since the city cut off its $85,000 in annual support last year, the house has been operating on reserve funds, which are expected to run out as early as next summer. In the coming months consultants hired by the city will try to come up with a business plan to make the Edgar Allan Poe House financially self-sufficient, possibly by updating its exhibits to draw more visitors.
But the museum sits amid a housing project, far off this city?s tourist beaten path, and attracts only 5,000 visitors a year.
?It would be ironic, after all these years of aggressively and actively promoting the Poe House and the Poe grave, to have it close,? said Jeff Jerome, the house?s curator for more than 30 years.
He said that to switch suddenly to a self-supporting model was impractical, given that the house generates only a small amount of revenue from admissions, special events and the sale of books and T-shirts.
The director of Baltimore?s planning department, Thomas J. Stosur, said that with the city facing a large budget gap last year, the subsidy cut was unavoidable. ?Everybody was under the gun to focus more on core services,? he said in a telephone interview.
The city has continued to provide a $55,500 grant to the Babe Ruth Birthplace Museum, which is more centrally located and draws six times as many visitors a year as the Poe House.
For decades Baltimore has prized its association with Poe, a master of the macabre who inspired the name for the city?s National Football League team, the Ravens.
It is here where Poe nurtured his fledgling career as a writer and where he died, in 1849 at the age 40, after he was found in a tavern delirious and in distress, two years after the death of his young wife, Virginia, from tuberculosis.
Poe lived with Virginia, who was his cousin, in a house at 203 North Amity Street. They married in 1836, when she was 13 and Poe was 27.
They shared the house with his aunt and Virginia?s mother, Maria Clemm; his grandmother, Elizabeth Cairnes Poe; and Virginia?s brother, Henry. When Poe moved in, he had just been kicked out of the United States Military Academy at West Point. He had published three books of poetry by then but received little recognition or payment for his writing.
But while living with the Clemms, who had little money, Poe turned his attention to short stories and had his first taste of literary success, winning $50 in a contest sponsored by The Baltimore Saturday Visiter for a story about a sailor who dies after his ship is destroyed by a storm and finds himself cast onto a vessel seemingly manned by ghosts. Poe was most likely living in the small third-floor bedroom when he wrote his first true horror story, ?Berenice,? about a man engaged to his sickly cousin who develops a morbid obsession with her teeth. After she dies ? or appears to, since later it is implied that she was buried alive ? he digs up her body and pulls them out.
Poe said that he based the story, which scandalized readers, on a rumor then circulating in Baltimore that graves were being robbed to supply dentists with teeth.
The exhibits in Poe House are modest: some china and glassware from the household of Poe?s foster father, in Richmond; a telescope reputedly used by Poe; locks of Poe?s and Virginia?s hair; and a fragment of his coffin, though some of the items are only occasionally on display, for conservation reasons.
The Poe House, which is owned by the Baltimore City Housing Authority, is designated a landmark, so it?s in no danger of being torn down, even if it closes as a museum. It is about a mile from Poe?s grave in the Westminster Burying Ground, where for decades a mysterious visitor left a half-filled bottle of cognac and three roses every year on his birthday, Jan. 19.
Several cities boast Poe-related sites. Richmond, Va., where he spent much of his childhood, has an Edgar Allan Poe Museum. In Philadelphia a house where Poe lived with Maria and Virginia from 1843 to 1844 is owned and operated by the National Park Service. Poe Cottage, in the Bronx, where Poe spent the last three years of his life, is owned by New York City but operated by the Bronx Historical Society. (It is currently closed while undergoing a major restoration, paid for largely by the city.)
Jeffrey A. Savoye, the secretary and treasurer of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, said it would be hard for the house here to be self-supporting because of its location, and because it does not have space that it can rent out for events.
?I really see only two probable avenues,? he said. ?One is the city comes to its senses and realizes they?re not saving a lot of money, so they might as well keep running it. And the other is some angel with a lot of money steps forward and can cover the costs.?
Jeffrey L. Nichols, the executive director of the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, which has had its own financial setbacks, said that the house might get a boost from the forthcoming release of a movie about Poe, titled ?The Raven? that stars John Cusack. ?Those things help,? he said, noting that last year?s publication of Twain?s unexpurgated autobiography brought a record number of visitors to his house.
Baltimore artists have also rallied to raise money for the Poe House. A street artist, who goes by the name Gaia, made a limited-edition print of a raven, which is being sold by a local gallery to benefit the house. With about a quarter of the 100 prints sold so far, sales have raised about $10,000.
Mr. Jerome said it would be especially unfortunate for the house to close, given that it was barely saved from demolition 70 years ago, when the housing project was being built. At the time the Poe society conducted research to prove that Poe lived in the house, and ultimately persuaded the housing authority to spare it.
Because of who Poe was, and what he wrote about, his lingering presence seems stronger in this house than, say, somewhere where George Washington once slept. Writers like Stephen King come to visit. Visitors try to spook one another. People often ask whether the house is haunted.
The official answer is a soft no. But the final verdict may fall to Vincent Price, the actor, who Mr. Jerome said visited the house some years ago and paid it perhaps its highest compliment.
?This house,? Mr. Price offered, ?gives me the creeps.?
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