Continuing the dockside theme of recent ‘Picture Postals’… the Fulton Street Fish Market, and a view of some of the towers of New York City as they appeared in 1930.

“Some years ago Long and I attempted to explore the Fulton Fish Market section of New York — which is full of quaint scenes and buildings. I don’t know where I left the lunch I had eaten an hour previously — for I was too dizzy to read the street signs! In the end I managed to stagger out of the stench without actually losing consciousness …” — Lovecraft in a letter of 1933, Selected Letters IV.

This brief mention suggests this daytime after-lunch visit perhaps followed a perusal of the large used magazines bookstore on that section of Fulton Street. Evidently Lovecraft had strayed too close to one of the main market-places, probably as it was being sluiced out at the end of the day’s trading, and his well-known reaction to the smell of fish took hold of him.

“New” Fulton Fish market, 1910.

Yet, according to Vrest Orton’s memoir of Lovecraft in New York, the same area was also a fairly frequent night-walk haunt, as he and Lovecraft went in search of 18th century remains (see his memoir in Lovecraft Remembered). How to explain the apparently incongruity? My guess would be that the fish-smell was less so in the dead of night, when the boats were away and fishing, and the disinfected slabs of the fishmongers awaited the dawn and the landing of the catch? There is also the weather to consider. Lovecraft could have explored with Orton in New York in the winter, whereas an early 1930s visit with Long might have been in high summer.