With a cottage in the Bronx, a house in Philadelphia, a row house in Baltimore, and even a dorm room at the University of Virginia, Edgar Allan Poe has more residences preserved and open to the public than any other American author.

But woe is Poe. Times were always remarkably tough for Poe during his short life, and the same has been true for these houses in Poe’s afterlife. I have been to the houses multiple times. I once visited the Baltimore house on Halloween weekend to watch an actor perform “The Tell-Tale Heart” in one of the bedrooms. I guess I’m a bit of a Poe-house fanatic. Every time I visit one, I marvel at their continued existence and operation despite long odds. All three of his houses are in impoverished neighborhoods. The Baltimore house and the Bronx cottage have both been rescued many times from the brink. In the past few decades, they have both been in significant need of repair and renovation. Sadly, the Baltimore house’s future is again on the chopping block. It was recently reported that the City of Baltimore has defunded the house, which operates as a museum, for the second year in a row and it is now running on reserve funds (it's a designated landmark, so it won't be torn down, but it may have to close to the public). Meanwhile, the Poe cottage in the Bronx, the only writer’s house open to the public in New York City, is getting the renovation it has long needed. In addition, a new visitor’s center has been built facing the cottage.

When I visited the Poe cottage for the first time in 2008, I walked away with the overwhelming sense that it was made of once crisp, now soggy gingerbread and could collapse at any minute. It was musty and damp and crumbling—a fittingly shabby monument to the author’s macabre stories and tragic life—and it’s been that way for decades. Originally located across the street from its current location in Poe Park on the Grand Concourse, It faced demolition in the eighteen-nineties and was finally moved in 1913.

Not many people realize that there is a Poe house to visit in New York City, nor do they realize that it was Poe’s final residence. Poe is more commonly associated with Baltimore, where he died at age forty and was buried. But the circumstances of his death are mysterious: Poe had traveled to Virginia and was supposed to be on his way back to the Bronx when he detoured, for unknown reasons, to Baltimore. He was found muttering incoherently in a gutter there, and admitted to the hospital where he died.

On a rainy morning this past June, a few lucky Poe fans got to attend a “plaster party” dreamed up by the Historic House Trust of New York as a way to involve the public and Poe fans in its rehabilitation of the little farmhouse where Poe wrote the haunting “Annabel Lee” and “The Cask of Amontillado.” The public was encouraged to submit Poe-themed artwork to be buried in the wall of the house in a time capsule. The winners of the contest were invited to come help help plaster the lath-covered walls. (I entered an image of the Poe Cottage into the contest that I had commissioned last year from the design team M + E to celebrate the launch of Writers’ Houses, a Web site dedicated to authors’ homes and literary pilgrimage.)

While preparing to place the artwork in the time capsule, Angel Hernandez, a Bronx Historical Society historian, told us about the grim circumstances of Poe’s residence in the cottage. In 1846, he said, Poe’s wife, Virginia, was suffering from tuberculosis, so the family moved to the bucolic Bronx for the fresh air. But Virginia deteriorated quickly, and died within a year. Poe never really recovered. Of this time he wrote, “I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.” He died less than three years later.

After we each had our turn plastering the wall, we were given a brief tour of Poe house’s nearly completed visitor center in Poe Park. Designed by architect Toshiko Mori and administered by the Parks Department, the building’s soaring V-shape alludes to Poe’s poem “The Raven.”

I hoped that the small, unusual celebration, where perfect strangers came together with only Poe in common, would have pleased him. I also thought about the Baltimore Poe house that day and its notably different fate. Baltimore has built a significant portion of its tourism program around Poe, named a football team after his most famous poem, and yet, perhaps because of the gritty location (on the TV series “The Wire,” the first dead body discovered is located in the Poe House projects), tourism to the Poe house is not encouraged. Instead, attention is given to his grave, which is more centrally located.

All the more reason to be grateful for the significant conservation efforts currently ongoing in the Bronx. The work on Poe Park will continue throughout this year. If you’re hoping to visit, check the Bronx Historical Society Web site for news of its reopening.