More possibly-useful photo-reference for Lovecraftian graphic novels set in Providence. The Providence Police Station, of which I’ve never seen a postcard before.

I have several times been in a police station — usually to inquire about stolen property, & once to see the Chief of Police about the banning of a client’s magazine from the stands — but never in the part devoted to cells.” — Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, 29th May 1933.

In both these instances this was in New York. He had had all his suits and Loveman’s radio stolen by youths, while living at a squalid rooming house in Red Hook. The magazine was the ‘banned in Indiana’ issue of Weird Tales.

If he ever had cause to step inside Providence Police Station appears to be unknown. The stern frontage and lingering litter/trash does not make it look like the sort of place that would encourage a 14 year old Lovecraft to venture in during Winter 1904/5, to enquire about his lost cat Trigger-ban — though a graphic novel of his life might plausibly include such a scene — the staunch young Lovecraft weaving through the drunks and leering ner-do-wells to enquire about his beloved feline. Nevertheless, the Police Station was no doubt part of his mental geography of his city, both topographically and via the drip-feed of police news headlines he glanced at daily in the local newspaper. He did not actually read the ‘Police News’ pages, as he told his friend Moe in a letter of 1923, but one imagines some of the more front-page headlines of crime were unavoidable.