Poe's Life in Boston

THE PAVILION HOTEL
41 TREMONT ROW, BOSTON

Poe stayed at the Pavilion Hotel while in Boston to lecture and give a reading at the 13th anniversary of the Boston Lyceum. The reading took place at the Odeon (formerly Federal Street) Theatre where his mother, father and maternal grandmother had performed years before. In fact, Poe had been on this stage in utero during Eliza's last season there. Many, though not all, of Poe's Boston critics portrayed his Lyceum lecture as a humiliating disaster.

It is not known if the Pavilion (which no longer exists but which was then located across the street from the King's Chapel Burying Ground) was also the site of Poe's purported suicide attempt on November 5, 1848 in some Boston hotel. Poe apparently made that effort as part of an unsuccessful plan to entice Annie Richmond–a married Lowell, Mass., woman whom he loved–to come to him on his deathbed.

Drawing reproduced from Mary Elizabeth Phillips,
Edgar Allan Poe – The Man, 1926