The lower Seekonk shoreline does not seem to have been much photographed for postcards, and there are few postcards of it online and only one of York Pond itself (after the grading and extraction works). This is the largest I have of this particular card.

Here’s H.P. Lovecraft on the Park and shoreline…

“Scarce a stone’s throw from the house lie the nearest parts of that beautiful rustick reservation known as “Blackstone Park” — wherein I have been wont to wander some twenty or more years [i.e. since about age eight]. Here Nature unadorn’d displays a multiplicity of agreeable phases; ravines, groves, brooklets, thickets, & Arcadian stretches of river-bank — for the park borders on the wide & salty Seekonk. The Seekonk is call’d a river, but in truth ’tis but a bay or inlet. The river proper doth not begin till four miles to the north, where (changing its name successively to the Pawtucket & the Blackstone) its fresh streams flow over the mill dam at the Great Bridge of the city of Pawtucket. How beauteous indeed is untainted Nature as beheld in so idyllick a spot as Blackstone Park! […] I think this park would explain why such a born & bred town man shou’d possess such a taste for rural musings & Arcadian themes!

Here’s a Blackstone Park sketch made by Whitman Bailey in 1916. Looking down a sylvan path and ride, toward the glinting of the distant Seekonk.

The young Lovecraft also had a view of the Park and the Seekonk from his home…

“The roof of 598 Engelstrasse is approximately flat, and in the days of my youth I had a set of meteorological instruments there. Hither I would sometimes hoist my telescope, and observe the sky from that point of relative proximity to it. The horizon is fair, but not ideal. One can see the glint of the Seekonk through the foliage of Blackstone Park, and the opposite bank is quite clearly defined.”

One can glimpse a house with a flat roof and just such a view here (from The southern gateway of New England, 1910). The picture-maker looks across at the shore ride, from near Red Bridge…

The shoreline structure seen here is the Boat Club boathouse, thus by looking at maps one can see that the house glimpsed in the trees is likely to be one of those lining Lovecraft’s Angell St.

As one can also see above, the shoreline road was relatively low. No attempt seems to have been made to preserve the shore drive from being covered by the inevitable ten-year winter flood-surge. Indeed, Lovecraft dreamed of such things, but weirdly inverted and horribly revealing rather than covering…

“I was standing on the East Providence shore of the Seekonk River, about three quarters of a mile south of the foot of Angell Street, at some unearthly nocturnal hour. The tide was flowing out horribly — exposing parts of the river-bed never before exposed to human sight. Many persons lined the banks, looking at the receding waters & occasionally glancing at the sky. Suddenly a blinding flare — reddish in hue — appeared high in the southwestern sky; & something descended to earth in a cloud of smoke, striking the Providence shore near the Red Bridge — about an eighth of a mile south on [of?] Angell Street. The watchers on the banks screamed in horror — “It has come — It has come at last!” — & fled away into the deserted streets. [Blind panic ensues] By this time the river-bed was fully exposed — only the deep channel filled with water like a serpentine stream of death flowing through a pestilential plain in Tartarus.” (1920)

There evidently were floods but the natural inundations of winter were brief, expected and subsided. In summer he would often sit all day on the surviving southern bluff above York Pond, reading and writing. In 1927, a letter was headed as from… “High Wooded Bluff Above the Seekonk River – a mile East of 10 Barnes St.” He sometimes even shared his childhood haunt with close friends. Here is an instance from 1927…

“the next day we [he and Cook and Munn] lounged about the Blackstone Park woods beside the Seekonk — agrestick haunt of my earliest infancy, and true genesis of my pastoral soul.”

In a letter of 1934 he remarks…

Almost every warm summer afternoon I take my work or reading in a bag & set out for the wooded river-bank [on the Seekonk] or the fields & woods north of Providence — spending the time till dusk in one or more favourite rustic spots.

A year after Lovecraft passed away, a terrific natural flood struck Providence…

This must surely have also swept up the Seekonk and around his cherished wooded bluff in Blackstone Park, but understandably there seems to be no photo made of the Park shoreline at that time. Evidently the foliage and wildlife of the ponds at that point must be used to such occasional inundations.