A random walk is a mathematical term for a succession of random steps on some mathematical space. For the purposes of this blog, it’s more in line with the French term "flâneur" meaning a modern, urban stroller who walks and observes.

The High Bridge in the Bronx, built in 1848 as part of the Croton Aqueduct system, reopened in 2015 and is being refurbished as part of OneNYC2050. This might not be news to you, but did you know that there’s a lithograph of Edgar Allan Poe walking across that same bridge in the mid-1800s? If you wanted to follow in his proverbial footsteps, you could take a lonely, socially distanced walk over this very same bridge, or you could simply view the lithograph by Bernard Jacob Rosenmeyer from NYPL Digital Collections. While he may not have actually set foot on the bridge, as there is some question as to whether the pedestrian walkway existed at the time he was alive, it’s still fun to think of Poe’s brooding figure walking from the Bronx to Manhattan, or vice versa.

Read more about Poe's Walks on the High Bridge:

• Poe Walking on the High Bridge/Friends of the Old Croton Aqueduct
• Edgar Allan Poe’s Haunted Walks on the High Bridge/Ephemeral New York
• Edgar Allan Poe Walking the High Bridge/The High Bridge—It's Past, Present & Future

NYPL blog posts about Edgar Allan Poe in NYC, and more!

• Edgar Allan Poe in the Bronx
• Poe in the Village
• Where to Start with Edgar Allan Poe

Ready to read Poe?

• Works by Edgar Allen Poe in the NYPL catalog

Other Poe reads:

• The "The Tell-Tale Heart" is a good Poe story to read if you haven’t already, or to re-read if you’re looking for something spooky for this time of year. Many modern fiction writers have been inspired by Poe, including Dean Koontz. Cold Fire by Koontz is a good novel-length read-alike and a good place to start with him, with a creepy windmill taking the place of the original setting. (Here's the advice Koontz says Poe's agent would give him if he were alive today.) 
• The Black Cat by Poe and "The Cat from Hell" (in the short story collection Just After Sunset) by Stephen King share some similarities and some important differences. Both are good short stories. Don't let these fictionalized felines affect how you feel about real cats. Everyone knows real cats are awesome.
• In A Mind At Play, the biography of Claude Shannon, author Jimmy Soni references Poe’s "The Gold Bug" as Shannon’s “favorite”and credits it with getting him interested in code breaking.
• Poe inspired much of modern science fiction, even authors like Jules Verne and Arthur Conan Doyle, but he also inspired some scientists, including Einstein, with his work Eureka [available in English from Duke Classics, French translation by Charles Baudelaire].
• Poe by James M. Hutchisson is a biography that covers Poe's life in detail and all aspects of his character.
• Find other titles that celebrate the spooky on these lists of Books We Love to celebrate NYPL's quasquicentennial.