It’s interesting to find out that Providence had and still has, a 2000ft tunnel under Lovecraft’s beloved College Hill. In 1914 it replaced a cable-car system, and trolleys (trams) ran through until 1948. It still serves buses today.
There was a serious plan to create a subway system, but the First World War put it on hold. The idea was revived in the 1920s, but never happened.
Apparently there was also a mile-long Providence East Side Railway Tunnel, which likewise went under College Hill. Opened 1908 and stopped carrying passengers circa 1938. Some of the basements on the hill would rumble when a train passed beneath. It’s still there, but boarded up.
Which suggests that the 1926 “Pickman’s Model” could have had a model in Lovecraft’s Providence underground train experiences, as well as those on the New York subway and the short Boston Subway?
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So there was apparently also a cable-car system to get people over/up the hill, when Lovecraft was a child. One wonders if the pre-1914 rides on a rickety cable-car system may have had something to do with Lovecraft’s childhood nightmares of being swept through dizzying space by night gaunts?
Or, less poetically… did cable-car mean the tram-car was hauled up the hill on a cable?