While I pondered weak and weary…
Monday, March 28th, 2011
Unexpected connections
As a guest of Columbia University, I have been installed in the Milburn Hotel on W. 76th Street. I arrived on Sunday night at about 11 a.m., after the book launch for An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czeslaw Milosz at Brooklyn Central Library. I had not eaten anything except some hors d’oeuvres at a Polish literary party (with a bilingual reading by Polish poet Tomasz Różycki, and a Ukrainian poet whose name I did not catch) in a Westchester County, but plenty of cognac and wine had been poured into me — or, more honestly, I had gladly poured into myself after a long day.
So I didn’t have much of a sense of where I had landed when my friend, the NYU mathemetician Lindsey Van Wagenen, arrived to take me for coffee the next morning. Lindsey, sensitive to the need for a charming and picturesque setting for her visitor, discarded the usual Starbucks. We eventually wandered up to 84th Avenue and sat down at Edgar’s Café — I hadn’t thought about the name and chose a corner table beneath a big portrait of Edgar Allen Poe.
Nevermore...
The penny fell when big marble placque notified me that this quaint and intimate café occupied the former site of the Brennen Mansion, located on the street between West End Avenue and Broadway known as Edgar Allen Poe Street. Heavens, I hadn’t really associated America’s famous writer with New York City at all.
The plaque, put up by the New York Shakespeare Society in 1922, informed us that Poe resided right where we were standing, between March 1844 and August 1845.
Important dates for the artist: He composed “The Raven” here.
They make a pretty good goat cheese omelette, too, and a dynamite cappuccino.
