Though best known as a poet and short-story writer, Edgar Allan Poe was also a noteworthy editor (of the monthly Southern Literary Messenger) and journalist. The following two paragraphs appeared in the first of several "weekly epistles" on New York City that he wrote for a Pennsylvania newspaper. Note Poe's attention to details of place and the ways that his descriptions evoke moods as well as images.

from Doings of Gotham (1844)

by Edgar Allan Poe

I have been roaming far and wide over this island of Mannahatta. Some portions of its interior have a certain air of rocky sterility which may impress some imaginations as simply dreary--to me it conveys the sublime. Trees are few; but some of the shrubbery is exceedingly picturesque. Not less so are the prevalent shanties of the Irish squatters. I have one of these tabernacles (I use the term primitively) at present in the eye of my mind. It is, perhaps, nine feet by six, with a pigsty applied externally, by way both of portico and support. The whole fabric (which is of mud) has been erected in somewhat too obvious an imitation of the Tower of Pisa. A dozen rough planks, "pitched" together, form the roof. The door is a barrel on end. There is a garden, too; and this is encircled by a ditch at one point, a large stone at another, a bramble at a third. A dog and a cat are inevitable in these habitations; and, apparently, there are no dogs and no cats more entirely happy.

On the eastern or "Sound" face of Mannahatta (why do we persist in de-euphonizing the true names?) are some of the most picturesque sites for villas to be found within the limits of Christendom. These localities, however, are neglected--unimproved. The old mansions upon them (principally wooden) are suffered to remain unrepaired, and present a melancholy spectacle of decrepitude. In fact, these magnificent places are doomed. The spirit of Improvement has withered them with its acrid breath. Streets are already "mapped" through them, and they are no longer suburban residences, but "town-lots." In some thirty years every noble cliff will be a pier, and the whole island will be densely desecrated by buildings of brick, with portentous facades of brown-stone, or brown-stonn, as the Gothamites have it.

Edgar Allan Poe, "Doings of Gotham: Letter I," in The Columbia Spy (Columbia, Pennsylvania), May 18, 1844. Reprinted in Doings of Gotham, edited by Thomas Olive Mabbott (Jacob E. Spannuth, 1929).