Harold Hart Crane was born at this site on July 21, 1899, to Grace Hart Crane and Clarence A. Crane, the inventor of Lifesaver Candies, and lived here until the age of three. Called “a born poet” by e.e. cummings, Crane dropped out of high school in 1916 and moved from Cleveland to New York City to pursue a literary career. Mainly self-educated, he drew influence from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. His major work, The Bridge (1930), uses the Brooklyn Bridge as a metaphor celebrating contemporary urban life, and its lyrical structure and rich imagery have led it to be regarded as one of the three major poetic sequences of the first half of the twentieth century, alongside T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and William Carlos Williams’ Paterson. Crane died on April 26, 1932.