Until he was aged about age 9 or 10 this would have been “the University library” (1878) that the boy Lovecraft knew of, as he mentally mapped the topography of College Hill and the wider city. The Library, being rather small for the growing university, was replaced by the current larger one in which Lovecraft’s letters are now housed.

The old Library then became simply “Robinson Hall”. The Economics Dept. relocated there in 1912 and, since Lovecraft was economically illiterate, it seems unlikely he knew it further other than by sight. The decorative exterior ironwork was lost due to decades of neglect, and when the ivy became unfashionable in the 1980s it was also removed. Like many desirable spaces in universities, by the early 1990s it was being used not by teachers and creatives but by the university admin staff. The building hung on until about 2017, when local press reports state it was demolished and replaced by an unremarkable modern admin block. One can’t help thinking what a wonderful ‘H.P. Lovecraft Museum and Archives’ it might have made, from the 1970s onward, serving as a significant tourist and visitor attraction for the city.

It was here that a strange final act of Lovecraft’s Providence life was staged. A large crowd gathered outside one Sunday in the fall/autumn of 1959, to see the surreal sight of H.P. Lovecraft’s entire house slowly moving through the streets of his city…

Truly, I never saw such fixed attention in a large crowd. I remember one elderly lady in tweeds who seated herself on a granite curb on the edge of the lawn at Robinson Hall to watch the show and enjoy a cigarette or two: she never once looked away from the slowly advancing house as she smoked.