"MARIE-ROGET" STEPS

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 89, 12 October 1938, Page 8

"MARIE-ROGET" STEPS

DOOMED BY WORKS PLAN

The lower three flights of the famous Lossburg Steps, which figured ninetyseven years ago in an unsolved murder that inspired Edgar Allen Poe to write "The Mystery of Marie Roget," are to surrender to progress—in the form of a W.P.A. road-widening project—after a century or more of existence, says the "New York Times."

The historical steps run from the top of the Palisades, where they command a view of New York's Times Square lights at night, to the bottom of the cliffs at Hackensack Avenue, abutting the old "plank road." From a time dating even before the murder the steps have been a rendezvous for young couples.

The exact age of the steps is not on record but, in August, 1841, a Neir York tobacconist's clerk named Mary Cecelia Rogers was murdered after haying been seen last on the Lossburg Steps in company with a man. Her mutilated body was found floating in the Hudson River, and, several weeks later, the body of her companion also was found in the Hudson. One theory was that she was murdered by her companion, who later committed suicide, but the crime generally is regarded as unsolved.

Poe's papers, according to historians, definitely indicate that his story of "Marie Roget" was based on the Rogers case, though the locale was changed from Weehawken to Paris.

The site of the present Hackenspck Avenue originally was an Indian trail, laid out as a road in 1721. In 1802 it was made a toll road, and some time thereabout received its plank covering. The planks gradually were replaced as automobiles supplanted the stage coaches that once thundered over the wooden surface, and several years ago the last plank was taken up.

Now that the W.P.A. is widening and improving the road between Ninteenth and Gregory Streets, the bottom three flights of the Lossburg steps will have to be destroyed. The W.PA., project calls for restoration of as much of the three flights as is feasible, but the wooden steps will be replaced with concrete. Eventually, it is reported, all of the Lossburg steps are to be replaced with concrete.

Originally the steps led from the old Loss Hotel, operated by John Loss. John Bantz, a resident of Weehawken, recalled that he assisted in tearing down the old hotel in 1880.