# Travels in Philadelphia/Catterina of Spring Garden Street

| “ | She was a big tortoise-shell puss called Catterina (Kate for short) and she lived in a little three-story brick cottage on Brandywine street, which is just off Seventh street behind the garage that now stands on the northwest corner of Seventh and Spring Garden. Catterina played a distinguished, even a noble, part in American literature. I am the gladder to celebrate her because I do not believe any one has ever paid her a tribute before. You see, she happened to be the particular pet and playmate of Mr. and Mrs. Edgar Allan Poe. | ” |
CATTERINA OF SPRING GARDEN STREET
Spring Garden street is a pleasant thoroughfare for wandering on a cool summer morning about eight-thirty of the clock. It has been my diversion, lately, to get off the Reading train at the Spring Garden Station and walk to the office from there instead of pursuing the too familiar route from the Terminal. Try it some day, you victims of habit. To start the day by a little variation of routine is an excellent excitement for the mind.
That after-breakfast period, before the heat begins, has a freshness and easy vigor of its own. Housewives are out scrubbing the white marble steps; second-hand furniture dealers have spread their pieces on the pavement for better inspection and sit in their morris chairs by the curb to read the morning paper. Presumably the more ease and comfort they show the more plainly the desirability of a second-hand morris chair will be impressed on the passer-by; such is the psychology of their apparent indolence. A fire engine with maroon chassis and bright silver boiler rumbles comfortably back to its station after putting out a fire somewhere. The barbers are out winding up the clock-work that keeps their red and white striped emblems revolving. And here and there on the pavement, reclining with rich relish ​where the sunlight falls in white patches, are gray and yellow cats.
The cats of Spring Garden street are plump and of high cheer and they remind me of the most famous cat that ever lived in that neighborhood. She was a big tortoise-shell puss called Catterina (Kate for short) and she lived in a little three-story brick cottage on Brandywine street, which is just off Seventh street behind the garage that now stands on the northwest corner of Seventh and Spring Garden. Catterina played a distinguished, even a noble, part in American literature. I am the gladder to celebrate her because I do not believe any one has ever paid her a tribute before. You see, she happened to be the particular pet and playmate of Mr. and Mrs. Edgar Allan Poe.
It is curious that Philadelphia pays so little honor to that house on Brandywine street, which is associated with the brief and poignant domestic happiness of that brilliant and tragic genius. Poe lived in Philadelphia from 1838 until 1844, and during the last two or three years of his stay he occupied the little brick house on Brandywine street. One of those who visited it then described it as "a small house, in one of the pleasant and silent neighborhoods far from the center of the town, and though slightly and cheaply furnished everything in it was so tasteful and so fitly disposed that it seemed altogether suitable for a man of genius." What is now only a rather dingy back yard was then a little garden full of roses, ​ and creepers. Perhaps the pear tree that is still the most conspicuous feature of the yard was growing in Poe's tenancy. It was a double tree, with twin trunks, one of which was shattered by lightning quite recently.
Mrs. William Owens, who has lived in the house for eight years, was kind enough to take me through and showed me everything from attic to cellar. The house is built against a larger four-story dwelling which fronts on Seventh street, now numbered as 530. In Poe's day the two houses were separate, the larger one being the property of a well-to-do Friend who was his landlord. Since then doors have been pierced and the whole is used as one dwelling, in which Mrs. Owens takes several boarders. It would interest Poe perhaps (as he was once in the army) to know that a service flag with three stars hangs from the front of the house. The stars represent John Pierce, Harry Bernhardt and Dominic Dimonico, the first of these being, as I understand, a foster son of Mr. and Mrs. Owens.
It is not hard to imagine the charm of this snug little house as it may have been in the days when Poe (in his early thirties) and his sylphlike young wife and heroic mother-in-law, Mrs. Clemm, faced the problem of living on the irregular earnings of editing and writing. Spring Garden was then near the northern outskirts of the city: the region was one of sober ruddy brick (of that rich hue dear to Philadelphia hearts) and well treed and gardened. ​Until very recent years an old lady was living, a neighbor of Mrs. Owens, who remembered how Virginia Poe used to sit at the window and play her harp.
The house is well and solidly built; the door opening toward Brandywine street still has its original old-fashioned bolt lock, which Poe's hand must have fastened many and many a time. The little dining room has a fireplace, now filled in with a stove. In one of the rooms upstairs (according to local tradition) "The Raven" was written; and there are two bedrooms with casement windows in the attic. Some of Poe's finest work was done in this house, among other tales probably "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Gold Bug" and "The Black Cat." And here a curious coincidence may be noted. It will be remembered that in the story of "The Black Cat" Poe describes how some very unpleasant digging was done in a cellar. In cleaning the cellar of the Brandywine street house Mrs. Owens discovered recently a place where the bricks in the flooring had been removed and a section of planking had been put in. Is it possible that this circumstance suggested to Poe the grisly theme of his story? Just for fun I would very much like to explore under those boards. They are old and have evidently been there a long time.
Imagination likes to conjure up the little household: the invalid Virginia Poe (it was in this house that she broke a blood vessel while singing), the ​stout-hearted and all-sacrificing mother-in-law—"Muddy," as the poet affectionately called her—the roses that grew over the wall, and (let us not forget her) Catterina, the cherished pet. Catterina was very much a member of the family. In April, 1844, when Poe and his wife moved to a boarding house in New York, where they found the table amazingly cheap and plentiful, he wrote to Mrs. Clemm:
"The house is old and looks buggy. The cheapest board I ever knew. I wish Kate could see it—she would faint. Last night, for supper, we had the nicest tea you ever drank, strong and hot—wheat bread and rye bread—cheese—tea cakes (elegant), a great dish (two dishes) of elegant ham and two of cold veal, piled up like a mountain—three dishes of the cakes and everything in the greatest profusion. No fear of starving here."
Poor Catterina (or Kate, as they sometimes called her)! Does not this suggestion of her swooning imply that she may have had to go on rather short commons in the little home on Brandywine street? But after all, there must have been mice in the cellar, unless the ghost of the Black Cat frightened them away.
In the same letter, written from New York the day after the Poes had gone there to look for better fortune, he says "Sissy (his wife) had a hearty cry last night because you and Catterina weren't here."
But it was in the winter of 1846-47, when Mrs. ​Poe lay dying of consumption in the cottage at Fordham, that Catterina came to her highest glory. The description of that scene touches upon a human nerve of pity and compassion that must give the most callous a pang. Poe himself, harassed by poverty, pride and illness, had to witness the sufferings of his failing wife without ability to ease them. This is the description of a kind-hearted woman who saw them then:
"There was no clothing on the bed but a snow-white counterpane and sheets. The weather was cold and the sick lady had the dreadful chills that accompany the hectic fever of consumption. She lay on the straw bed, wrapped in her husband's great-coat, with a large tortoise-shell cat in her bosom. The wonderful cat seemed conscious of her great usefulness. The coat and the cat were the sufferer's only means of warmth."
Perhaps Philadelphia will some day do fitting honor to the memory of that ill-starred household that knew its best happiness in the little house on Brandywine street. Mr. Owens, who is a druggist, has whimsically set up in the front parlor one of the big scarlet papier-mache ravens that are used to advertise Red Raven Splits. But it seems to me that Philadelphia might go just a little further than that in honoring the house where "The Raven" may have been written.