Via The New York Times: Poe’s Bronx Cottage Is Restored: It was a poor man’s house, with tiny rooms and low ceilings when Edgar Allan Poe lived there more than 160 years ago, when residing in what later became the Bronx meant breathing fresh country air. Now this city-owned cottage, where Poe wrote the poems “Annabel Lee” and “The Bells” and the short story “The Cask of Amontillado,” is receiving the finishing touches of a nearly half-million dollar renovation. And while the official date to reopen the house after more than a year of work is still uncertain, school groups have started to visit the site, at the Grand Concourse and East Kingsbridge Road in the Fordham neighborhood, this week. The timing seems only fitting. October is the month of Poe’s mysterious death, in 1849, and ends with Halloween, whose spirit is so expertly evoked by his memorably macabre stories like “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Pit and the Pendulum.”

Top Photo: The interior of Edgar Allan Poe’s cottage in the Bronx, where he lived more than 160 years ago with his wife and his mother-in-law.

Bottom Photo: Workers finishing restoration of the Poe cottage in the Bronx, which underwent a half-million dollar renovation.

Text: Patricia Cohen Photos: Fred R. Conrad