Two postcard plans of Roger Williams Park, Providence. Here’s the first. This card is from about 1907, and thus indicative of the park which Lovecraft would have known as a boy…
I can just about read the words, and can spot things like a “Dutch Garden”. Which is a distinctive garden form also appears in “The Lurking Fear”, forming the setting for the “deserted mansion”. The distinctive garden form is, as I wrote in a footnote to my annotated “Lurking Fear”…
“A rectangular formal garden laid out with angular geometric sunken paths, creating a densely packed atmosphere. Often planted with Dutch tulips and other vivid and erect flowers, and with a rectangular sunken pool in the centre.”
One also has to wonder if the riding of the zebra in Lovecraft’s Dream Quest might not be some distant reflection of his boyhood desire to ride the zebra on the Park’s merry-go-round…
There was also a bandstand. S.T. Joshi notes that… “There is a curious letter to the editor of the Providence Sunday Journal for August 3, 1913, complaining of the inadequate seating for band concerts at Roger Williams Park (the letter suggests that Lovecraft was a frequent attendant of these concerts)” — I Am Providence.
A later letter reveals that he went there with family, in his grandfather’s time…
“I had just as good a time as I ever used to have in youth listening to the concerts of Reeves’ American Band at Roger Williams Park with my grandfather. Old days …. old days……”
“Reeves’ American Band from Providence”, 1902.
These would have been the faces an eleven or twelve year old Lovecraft would have seen playing their instruments in the Park. His own group of friends occasionally formed their own amateur Band, with penny whistles and zithers and the like, presumably in juvenile emulation of the Park band.
At about this time he was also a keen bicyclist, and evidently bicycling was permitted in the Park…
This was posted 1906, so might have been photographed a few years earlier, making the boys in the picture about Lovecraft’s age.
He also wrote that he had visited a ‘cosmic’ exhibition at the Museum there, c. 1916…
“There is now on exhibition at the museum of Roger Williams Park a remarkable collection of astronomical photographs, taken by the celebrated Prof. Percival Lowell of Flagstaff, Arizona, whose theories concerning [‘canals’ on] the planet Mars are so widely known. The pictures are in the form of glass transparencies, exhibited in a darkened room, and illuminated from behind, so that they stand out with vivid clearness”.
Evidently Lovecraft later had some correspondence with the Museum Director, on his return to Providence from New York. The “History of the Necronomicon” is partly written on the back of a 27th April 1927 letter to Lovecraft from William L. Bryant, the Director.
Here are some pictures of the animals in the interior of the Museum. Note the lobster and sea-things in jars and bottles…
He was also amused by the various exotic animals to be seen alive in the grounds of the Park. For instance, he once commented on a photo of himself…
“Note the proboscidian effect,” [meaning his large nose, in his photograph of him made by Robert Barlow] he said, “my only local rival in that field being the elephant at Roger Williams Park. Keep this curio if it’s of any use — I ordered six prints from Barlow.”
He also investigated the new Benedict Monument to Music in the Park, dedicated in September 1924, which had been built while he was away in New York City…
“I took the [trolley] car for Roger Williams Park to search out that new classick marble temple which I had never seen…”
He writes that he was moved to ecstasy by the austere classical style and quiet setting of this acoustic stage for musical performances…
“All visible objects [were] the hushed and tenantless greensward, the piercing blue of sky and water, the gleaming and half-erubescent whiteness of the towering temple itself combin’d with the background of translacustrine forest and the warmth and magick of mid-spring to create an atmosphere of induplicable fascination, and even of a kind of pagan holiness.” — quoted by L. Sprague de Camp in Lovecraft: A Biography.
Here is the second map of the Park, a two-tone postcard probably from the 1930s. Note the dragon in the top-right, next to a male peacock. Was there a dedicated lizard-house, or does this simply indicate the Menagerie house?
Lovecraft still visited and strolled the Park at this point, in summer, as one of his letters for 30th July 1933 is headed from “Bench in Roger Williams Park”.
