The edgy new $4.5 million, bird-shaped Poe Park Visitor’s Center, once on pace to open four months ago, remains shuttered and is not scheduled to open any time soon as the Parks Department scrambles to figure out how to staff it, according to an article today in the New York Times.

In early June, the Norwood News asked the Parks Department when the Visitor’s Center would open to the public. In an e-mail, Parks Department spokesman Zachary Feder responded: “We’re in the process of making the final preparations needed to open the center. The center will be open before the end of the month.”

Nearly five months later, the Visitor’s Center still hasn’t opened. Angel Hernandez, of the Bronx Historical Society, which helps run the recently renovated Poe Cottage, told the Times that the neither the society or the Parks Department can afford to staff the new center. Hernandez said they’ve failed to secure any grants or funding to help staff it and the Parks Department rejected a proposal to sell paving stones engraved with the names of donors, as they’ve done in at least one other city park, the Times points out.

“We are looking into the intricacies of managing the center,” Deputy Parks Commission Larry Scott Blackmon told the Times.

Meanwhile, Poe Park visitors still don’t have a place to use the bathroom — the Times reported that there was a note saying the locked bathrooms were under repair when a reporter visited last week — and the exterior of the building is already being vandalized.

Other than all that gloom, there’s a load of great detail about Poe Cottage, the final home of Edgar Allan Poe, as well as the interesting a mysterious history of the writer’s final years.

Here’s a Norwood News story on the Poe Cottage renovation project, and another story on the visitor’s center, which reports that it was originally slated to open in April, of 2010.

— Alex Kratz