Following last Friday’s Rhode Island ‘letter carrier’ postcard, this week… the Post Office itself. I don’t know that there was any sub-Post Office up on College Hill, and I’ve never heard tell of one. So I presume that Lovecraft would have been familiar with strolling down the hill to his city’s new main Post Office, after it opened circa 1908. It was replaced in 1940.

On opening, circa 1908:

Seen below about ten years later, settling in to its surroundings and greening up, though now overshadowed by new commercial buildings that have sprung up…

The interior obviously had an interestingly curvy and almost ‘gloopy’ feel to it, which offset the uprights:

I can find no explicit mention by Lovecraft of using the Providence Post Office, in the searchable material I have access to. Those were the days of strong postal censorship, and letters might be opened. So presumably it was best not to mention the building, if his local postal service was working as intended? Yet the wider postal service and its constant use loomed large in his professional and amateur life, as well as for his general correspondence. He does describe the Washington Post Office, though, and in terms that would seem to echo the building in Providence…

Now came stamps — bought at a post office next the station where a grandly cloistral air animated an interior of vast size and drowsily ornate dimness.