Providence, as if seen from a night-gaunt hovering above 66 College St. Available as an 8000px .TIF at the LOC.
This 1895 supplement the Providence Sunday newspaper at first appears to be a standard and rather dull city engraving of the period, until one zooms right in and sees the quality of the ink and wash work. Here we see a detail of the Providence river and dockside, the side usually shunned by postcard-makers…
In letters of the 1930s Lovecraft recalled the rigged sailing-ships of Providence, seen and admired in his youth but now departed.
In the heavy fog of late November 1923, his Providence friend Eddy introduced him to the sinister courtyards and back-alley labyrinths which ran back from the dockside seen above…
a squalid colonial labyrinth in which I moved as an utter stranger, each moment wondering whether I were indeed in my native town or in some leprous, distorted witch-Salem … there was a fog, & out of it & into it again mov’d dark monstrous diseas’d shapes … narrow exotick streets and alleys … grotesque lines of gambrel roofs with drunken eaves and idiotick tottering chimneys … streets, lines, rows; bent and broken, twisted and mysterious, wan and wither’d … claws of gargoyles obscurely beckoning to witch-sabbaths of cannibal horror in shadow’d alleys that are black at noon … and toward the southeast, a stark silhouette of hoary, unhallowed black chimneys and bleak ridgepoles against a mist that is white and blank and saline — the venerable, the immemorial sea”. (Lovecraft, heavily abridged from a letter to Morton, 5th December 1923).
Zooming further in we see a lone rower on the river…
As a sturdy lad, Lovecraft was for a short time an avid rower in a small boat, a period from which memories probably linger in the story “Dagon”. Lovecraft was (so far as we know) only boating around the corner on the Seekonk, rather than pulling past the sailing-ships and coalers as seen here. Still, the sight of a little rower is evocative of a freer time…
“I used to row considerably on the Seekonk … Often I would land on one or both of the Twin Islands — for islands (associated with remote secrets, pirate treasure, and all that) always fascinated me.” — Lovecraft letter to Rimel, April 1934.
Responding to an older ‘picture postal’ post about the Hope Reservoir and Pumping station with closed comments: I am doing research on the East Side neighborhood of Providence where that reservoir resided, and I believe you are right about the connection you draw between the two, and perhaps more directly than you stated. There is record of Lovecraft having written in a letter of taking inspiration from the recently opened Scituate Reservoir. The Scituate Reservoir was the direct replacement for the Pawtuxet water system, of which the Hope Reservoir was a part. When Scituate’s water treatment facility came online in 1926, the Hope pumping station was decommissioned. While it’s true I am unaware of Lovecraft specifically stating “Hope Reservoir” was an influence, the distinction may be one of semantics. (Would greatly appreciate connecting to further discuss!)
“There is record of Lovecraft having written in a letter of taking inspiration from the recently opened Scituate Reservoir”.
Yes, you’re right Tom – that late letter is mentioned by Joshi in “I Am Providence”. It’s then interesting that the two events – draining one and filling the other – should be so closely connected.