This is the concluding part of Friday ‘picture postals’ from Lovecraft: Newburyport – part one, looking at new views of Newburyport. Which was Lovecraft’s key model for Innsmouth.
Below are maps and postcards not seen before in posts on this blog (these posts have included part one, and Along the Innsmouth shoreline among others).
Maps:
“the youth drew for my benefit a rough but ample and painstaking sketch map of the town’s salient features.”
The Joppa clam shanties and Joppa landing:
“Not a living thing did I see, except for the scattered fishermen on the distant breakwater, and not a sound did I hear save the lapping of the harbour tides …”
Clam men at work:
“Once or twice I saw listless-looking people working in barren gardens or digging clams on the fishy-smelling beach below …”
The town:
A Lovecraft-a-alike figure heads to the Innsmouth-type hotel. “Despite what I had heard of this hotel [the Gilman House] in Newburyport, I signed the register, paid my dollar, let the clerk take my valise, and followed that sour, solitary attendant up three creaking flights of stairs past dusty corridors which seemed wholly devoid of life.”
“a curious sort of buzz or roar seemed to be increasing in the direction of Town Square.”
A Lovecraft-a-alike figure on the bench. “The open space was, as I had expected, strongly moonlit; and I saw the remains of a park-like, iron-railed green in its centre.”
“There would, I knew, be plenty of deserted doorways to shelter me in case I met any person or group who looked like pursuers.” As we can see here, one could hop over the fence either side of the door and down into the scraggly plants or let-down behind.
“The public first learned of it in February, when a vast series of raids and arrests occurred [in Innsmouth], followed by the deliberate burning and dynamiting — under suitable precautions — of an enormous number of crumbling, worm-eaten, and supposedly empty houses along the abandoned waterfront.”
MISSING CARD.
Scary driveway/entrance to the ‘homeopathic’ hospital.
“Complaints from many liberal organisations were met with long confidential discussions, and representatives were taken on trips to certain camps and prisons. As a result, these societies became surprisingly passive and reticent.”
The “Devil’s Den”, a name which some have noted is akin to Innsmouth’s offshore “Devil Reef”.