When Mr. H.P. Lovecraft stepped down onto the platform of the Pennsylvania Station, on his first ever visit to New York in April 1922, he was surrounded by the neo-gothic imagination in the very architecture of the place. Architecture critic Vincent Scully once famously said of the station’s vaulting interior…

“One entered the city like a god”

Here the power of the literary imagination to change reality with the pen was literally all around him, as he walked up from the platforms into the area covered by the immense vaulted glass and steel roof. The gothic revival had been widely popularised via Walpole’s sensational horror novel (followed by others), and the great boom in ‘the neo-gothic in architecture’ that followed had in short order changed the very fabric of the larger cities…

There then appears to have been a transition into more and more immense Roman styles (no doubt also enjoyed by Lovecraft, who considered himself a sort of ‘Roman via Britain’) as if one were making the journey of civilisation from the underworld to the light in just a few minutes…

“murmurous with the immense and distant sound of time. Great, slant beams of moted light fell ponderously athwart the station’s floor, and the calm voice of time hovered along the walls and ceiling of that mighty room, distilled out of the voices and movements of the people who swarmed beneath. It had the murmur of a distant sea, the languorous lapse and flow of waters on a beach. It was elemental, detached, and indifferent to the lives of men… Few buildings are vast enough to hold the sound of time, and… there was a superb fitness in the fact that one which held it better than all others should be a railroad station.” — Thomas Wolfe , from You Can’t Go Home Again, describing the old Pennsylvania Station.

… but there was also that weird ceiling, like a giant alien spaceship, perhaps emblematic of the inheritance the West had had from places such as Byzantium?…