George Laswell’s artbook Corners and characters of Rhode Island (1924) is now in the public domain and online at Archive.org as a good scan. Possibly also at Hathi, although for the last few months Hathi has been so slow and un-responsive as to be totally un-usable.

My thanks to Ken Faig Jr. who in the latest Lovecraft Annual points out that Sonia recalled that Lovecraft knew and admired Laswell’s pen sketches — since they had first appeared weekly in his local newspaper. A paper on which Laswell was the Staff Artist. Oh, for the days when a local newspaper had a Staff Artist who worked in crisp pen and ink…

That must have been circa 1921-1924, and thus we see Providence as it was after the First World War but before Lovecraft left for New York City. The main focus is on the worthy and seemingly timeless historic buildings, many of which Lovecraft mentions in his letters and stories. While posterity might have preferred a selection of the less-noticed elements of Providence — such as the bookstores, the hidden courtyards and their cats, the Seekonk shoreline and its dark ravine-pools — the book’s extensive survey of the city’s key buildings does make it a handy ‘look up tool’ for visualising a building as described in Lovecraft’s work or letters.

But there are two or three glimpses of the less genteel life of the city, of the sort that Lovecraft could have encountered on waterfront night-walks in the early 1920s. Such as the dredging fleet which over-wintered at Fox Point, and this portrait of the wooden waterfront with its cheap cafes that (so the text says) often went up in flames and burned out sections of the waterfront.

Burned out

I can imagine Lovecraft and Eddy breezing into one of these coffee cabins at the crack of dawn, in the early 1920s, after a long night-walk.