The dyke and spillway at Sheepshead Bay, New York City. Presumably the open sea is on one side, hence the spray of the waves hitting the breakwater, and a low semi-tidal salt-marsh bay is on the other side.
This appears to be the southernmost extremity of a watery landscape that H. P. Lovecraft discovered rather early in his encounter with New York City, because Dench had his home there…
Dench’s [home on Emmons Ave. was a regular amateur press meeting-place, and was located] by the old, curious wharves of Sheepshead Bay [near the old Dutch marsh country, that being] “the vast, low-lying flat lands and salt marshes of Southern Brooklyn; where old Dutch cottages reared their curved gables, and old Dutch winds stirred the sedges along sluggish inlets brooding gray and shadowy and out of reach of the long red rays of hazy setting suns.
Emmons Ave., Sheepshead Bay, in 1931, showing how it fronted the wharves and jetties. John Milton Heins’s “Face to Face with Amateur Journalists” (1920 reprinted in The Fossil #333 from The American Amateur) reveals a few more details of the Dench house, confirming that it was directly on the shoreline… “Sheepshead Bay in a bungalow, on the water front”. In Lovecraft’s time this waterfront was a busy working place, and in the season boats were eagerly hired by sports fishermen and hunters. The following two maps show the Sheepshead Bay shoreline frontage in broad relation to Fulton St. and Prospect Park, and the flatlands to the north. The detailed topographical maps shows the exact location of the Sheepshead Bay shoreline frontage on which Dench’s house was located, and the proxity to the named “Flatlands” settlement and its wide marshland surroundings. One can see why the area provided New York City with such excellent fishing and duck-hunting.
Almost the entire Long Island shoreline was once salt-marsh flatland and swamps. By Lovecraft’s time most of this was long gone, but the New York City Guide of 1939 reported a settlement called the ‘Flatlands’ remained and that… “Much of the southern section [of this] is unreclaimed marshland” with a population of rough squatters and fishermen. Lovecraft’s “vast, low-lying flat lands and salt marshes” of the 1920s thus appear to have run south of the settlement of Flatlands toward Sheepshead Bay, with “Bergen Beach” being mentioned by the Guide as an especially bleak place: “At Bergen Beach, the brooding silence of the dour marshland hangs over old houses and shanties”.
This watery landscape had originally drawn Dutch settlers because it reminded them of the very similar fenland country in Holland, and they knew how to work it and what could be got from it. By Lovecraft’s time it seems that the Dutch had mostly moved on and up in New York society, but their relics remained and continued to fascinate him. For instance Lovecraft’s self-parodying story “The Hound” arose in September 1922 after… “I had been exploring an old Dutch cemetery in Flatbush, where the ancient gravestones are in the Dutch language”. He had chipped a small piece off a Dutch gravestone…
I must place it beneath my pillow as I sleep… who can say what thing might not come out of the centuried earth to exact vengeance for his desecrated tomb? And should it come, who can say what it might not resemble?
It is likely that Lovecraft first knew the marshland area through walks there in the company of his fellow writer Everett McNeil. Seemingly in Autumn 1922, when they likely used Dench’s nearby house in Sheepshead Bay as a base. Possibly this large marshland area was not fully explored by Lovecraft in 1922. Nor during his later New York residency, unless perhaps you count as evidence the briefest vision of a pre-New York landscape in the story “He”… “in the distance ahead I saw the unhealthy shimmer of a vast salt marsh constellated with nervous fireflies.”
But the area and its Dutch heritage certainly fascinated Lovecraft. He continued to visits Flatbush for walks (for instance in August 1925), and drew heavily on his historical knowledge of the New York Dutch in “The Horror at Red Hook”. In 1928, when he briefly returned to New York, he spent much time intensively researching the Flatbush area, to seek out the most ‘antient’ buildings in the flatlands and other rare survivals from colonial times that might still lurk there. This project included venturing out (seemingly for the first time?) to the old tidal-mill called Gerritsen Mill…
Being oblig’d by circumstances to spend above a month and a half, last spring [Spring 1928], in the town of Flatbush, near New-York, in the province of that name, I resolv’d to make my sojourn pleasant by means of such observations of good scenery and historick monuments as the nature of the region permitted. […] My stay in Flatbush was chiefly notable for my discovery, thro’ diligent searching of many books, of several objects of much antiquity which I had never discover’d before. The western end of Long-Island, in which the village [of Flatbush] is situate, was settled by Hollanders at a very early date; and so widely scatter’d were their architectural constructions, that a surprising number have surviv’d to the present time amidst surroundings more and more incongruous. […]
But most of my late explorations dealt with those parts of the country south of the village; once very open and sparsely settled, but now fast spoilt by cheap streets and the cottages of an hybrid foreign rabble. On the 19th of May I made a trip to that part of Jamaica Bay call’d the Mill Basin, there seeing for the first time the Jan Schenck house, built in 1656 from the timbers of a privateer [ship], and reputed to be the oldest house in the entire province of New-York. This house, an old Dutch cottage with steep peaked roof, is situate on a flat tidal marsh near the shoar […]
On still another occasion I visited the old Gerritsen Tide Mill on a creek south of Flatbush. This was built in 1688, and a dam made at the same time still confines the rising waters of the sea. The wheel is in a good state, though the building itself hath suffer’d considerably since its abandonment near forty years ago. […]
Further explorations in Flatbush, Flatlands, New Utrecht, and related regions yielded many highly picturesque glimpses of old farmhouses, churches, churchyards, and other reliques of better days.
The Mill in 1922, as Lovecraft would have known it.
The newspaper cutting above is from 1934, after Lovecraft’s time as a resident in New York. A grand 1930s mega-scheme was afoot and intended to drain the marshes for a vast new leisure-park. The Gerritsen Mill might have been part of that, but it was conveniently burned down shortly after its restoration was announced. The scheme never happened, and New York got a wildlife preserve instead. But the burning was a small incident in a vast web of local corruption which grew around the draining and reclaiming of the swamps and marshes of the eastern USA in the 1890s-1930s period.
Lovecraft does not mention a boat, which at that point he presumably could not afford to hire, and which one would assume (from looking at the maps) would have been necessary to fully explore the area and reach the remotest homesteads. He was likely restricted to roads, tracks and trolley-buses.
Did the area have an influence on Lovecraft’s fiction? It seems doubtful, and even if it did then the influence is certainly not now provable.
i) One might wonder if perhaps the marshes vaguely contributed something to the general atmosphere of “Innsmouth” (written some three years later). But Lovecraft had known marshland (Cat Swamp) and wild creeks (the York Pond ravine) intimately in middle-childhood, and a number of swamps and marshes had been investigated during his adult travels and visits. Marshes at places such as Ipswich, Mass. may have more of a claim to have inspired those of “Innsmouth” — there is for instance an early 1917 Lovecraft poem “On Receiving a Picture of the Marshes at Ipswich” and Ipswich is very frequently mentioned in “Innsmouth”, albeit never in direct connection with marshes. Lovecraft instead re-positions his marshes to surround Innsmouth itself, and his… “wide salt marshes, desolate and unpeopled, keep neighbours off from Innsmouth on the landward side.” Although the narrator’s later wide views of the Innsmouth terrain do seem to hint that this marshland stretches away very extensively, perhaps even reaching nearly to the nearby Ipswich. That said, there are many salt-marshes on that 20-mile stretch of coast and they appear to occur all the way from Newburyport down to Gloucester. While these might have been picturesque in their own way, especially when surveyed from a hill or train, they appear to have been purely rural and thus lacked the enticingly ‘antient’ architectural elements that Lovecraft sought in Flatbush and the Brooklyn flatlands…
ii) There is a familial name-link with the Gerritsen Mill in the Brooklyn flatlands, as readers will remember that in Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook” the hero-villain Suydam marries a Cornelia Gerritsen. But the Gerritsen name had by then spread far and wide in New York.
iii) Some might even wonder about the impact of Lovecraft very probably getting inside a number of ancient primitively-built Dutch barns, in his intensive 1928 exploration of rural Flatbush — and how that might have influenced his central use of the barn in “The Dunwich Horror” (written some months later in August 1928)…
One also recalls that it is from the Wilbraham “marshland” that the memorable whippoorwills of that story came…
there are stretches of marshland that one instinctively dislikes, and indeed almost fears at evening when unseen whippoorwills chatter and the fireflies come out in abnormal profusion to dance to the raucous, creepily insistent rhythms of stridently piping bull-frogs.
iv) Interestingly, there was also local Sheepshead lore of a sea-monster. This was deemed to lurk a little way off the shoreline, but was surprisingly little-seen. This may, for some, recall the general idea of “The Horror at Martin’s Beach”. In the postcard seen below their local monster appears in a humourous photomontage of the time…
For those wondering about the Sheepshead placename, apparently it has nothing to do tasty mutton dinners — “Sheepshead” is simply the name of an abundant type of local edible fish, which gave its name to an early hotel, and thus the area was named.
A memoir of child-life out on the salt-flats, Thomas J. Campanella’s “The Lost Creek”, evocatively recalled this landscape as…
An incursion of nature into the cast grid of the city, Gerritsen is a relic landscape, a counterpoint to the artificiality of its surroundings. The rolling hummocks wear a soft, wind-tossed mane of reeds, and here and there thickets of aspen, sumac and bayberry punctuate the scene. Ring-necked pheasants, descendants from flocks released for a hunting estate in the nineteenth century, dart between clumps of phragmites [very tall densely-packed water-reeds]. Far off to the northwest the peaks of Manhattan are surreal, the tilted bedrock of an alien world. The steady hum of motors on the Belt Parkway recedes. The deep tide of time casts its spell.
As for Lovecraft, a 1931 letter to Morton (Selected Letters III) sees Lovecraft riffing through several pages of Kerouac-like ‘stream-of-consciousness’ word-associations, due to having eaten a tasty dish of roast lamb. His intent here is to convey to Morton the richness than can be obtained by simply musing on what one already knows, rather than using a mealtime to peruse a mundane newspaper in search of new ‘facts’. Lovecraft’s plate of roast lamb yields, among other fleeting cerebral associations…
Sheepshead Bay …… Emmons Ave. [Dench lived at 3052 Emmons Ave., Sheepshead Bay] …… stink of fish ….. Gerritsen Tide-mill 1688 … Avenue V . …… Neck Road .. ….. Stillwell House . . … Milestone. .. 8 miles to Brockland Ferry … flat marshlands, creeks, waving sedge, flutter of marsh birds .. .. .. curved cottage roofs … . east winds sighing of Old Holland .. … mutton-chop whiskers …. Victorian aera
“8 miles to Brockland Ferry” indicates the lore-haunted inscription on the old milestone in front of the Voorhees homestead in Sheepshead Bay, on the corner of Neck Road and Ryder’s Lane. Thus we can be fairly sure the Voorhees house was encountered on Lovecraft’s Flatbush itinerary, along with many others. Many of these old houses were photographed in ways that do not suggest their landscape/shoreline context, but the Schenck House is an evocative exception…
Lovecraft’s recall of “mutton-chop whiskers …. Victorian aera” also suggests he may have met old Dutch men on his walks, men who still held to their homesteads and to the old Dutch manner of appearance and dress — albeit probably having abandoned their clog-wearing by that time…
Elsewhere the letters to Morton also give a strong indication that it was Everett McNeil who made Lovecraft aware of this unusual local waterscape, mostly likely in the early 1920s when Lovecraft was visiting rather than living in New York. He writes of McNeil in 1929, on learning of the old man’s death, and strongly links McNeil with the landscape by recalling the early 1920s and…
the vast, level reaches of the old Dutch marsh country around Sheepshead Bay, brooding with elder mystery in the autumn gloaming, and with the winds of old Holland’s canals blowing the sedges that waved and beckoned along strange, salty inlets. […] Through those fantastic streets, along those fantastic terraces [of New York City], and over those fantastic salt marshes with the waving sedges and sparse Dutch gables, the quaint, likeable little figure may continue to plod… phantom among phantoms…
The mention of “autumn” here might place the first walks into the marshlands, with McNeil, quite near in time to Lovecraft’s September 1922 exploration of the Flatbush churchyard that led to “The Hound”.
Lovecraft and McNeil would surely be pleased to know that the U.S. Army is currently putting the finishing touches to a decades-long restoration of 180+ acres of the old salt-marshes, meaning that a substantial part of the once “vast” flatlands have survived in a form that the two men would recognise.
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