In late December 1923 Lovecraft explored the India Wharf rail yards in Providence, ending up somewhere on the waterside between Fox Point and the rail bridge that crossed into East Providence.

We edged through ghastly channels between black silent freight cars on the India wharf at the southern tip of Providence’s east peninsula, a region I had never penetrated, though I had for twenty years or more wonder’d about it. It was an eldritch wiggle, like that of Alciphron in the tortuous crypts of Egypt, and at last we came out where pale phosphorescence effused from century’d rotting piles, and the distant harbour-lights bobb’d and twinkled away to the south, the far south, the south of dreams and templed isles, and curious ports, and pagodas of gold with savor of spice and incense around them. (Letters to Maurice W. Moe, page 510)

The context was that Morton was going home on the New York boat. In this case Lovecraft even tells us the name, the frigate Concord, seen here in Providence…

Both Morton and Loveman appear to have preferred to travel back from Providence this way. Though it appears to have taken Loveman a few tries to find the right passenger line and time of day to avoid the boorish crowd he had endured on his first such trip.

Lovecraft had first walked Morton up a long and insalubrious street that led to the New York docks, a street where as he put it…

where murther lurks in the alleys, and one stumbles over corpses in the gutters … a confused blur of pallid lamps and Hogarth vistas.

The latter must mean glimpses down alleys and entrances toward the riverside, as they walked up to Fox Point.

Once the luggage was stowed aboard, Morton found he had quite some time to wait until departure. Thus the pair appear to have slipped away down the adjacent freight lines. Presumably, over the Christmas break, the trains were backed up and not moving. There are two options for the exploration route. Either the pair threaded through the rail yards and a maze of freight trucks a relatively short way, to find the first good clear view over water to the south and the open sea. Or they walked the rails around to the industrial Wilkesbarre Pier and looked south from there, which seems far more unlikely.

Thus I’d say they were likely standing about here, in the chill and deepening dusk of 27th December 1923…

It’s interesting to think that an encounter with the black freight cars, arranged akin to “the tortuous crypts of Egypt”, could have informed the mood of his Houdini story “Under The Pyramids” in February 1924.

After seeing Morton off on the Concord, Lovecraft wrote that he walked back into town and took in a silent “cinema”. What might have been playing at that point in time? Salome and Lon Chaney’s While Paris Sleeps were both released at the start of 1923. There was no new Chaplin comedy feature in the second half of 1923, as Chaplin had made his first swerve into trying to be “serious” and it was a box-office disaster. The rest of the end-of-1923 fare seems very unappealing stuff. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (early September 1923) might still have been in cinemas, but Lovecraft had probably already seen it by then. Yet there was the German UFA silent feature The Street. This sinister cinema was released at the end of November 1923, and UFA was a big studio with USA distributors. Lovecraft had no German, but for a silent movie that wasn’t a problem. In The Street…

“The city is an expressionistic nightmare, a dangerous and chaotic place. The unfortunate man encounters thieves, prostitutes, and other predators. But the real threat [is that] The street itself is alive and watching.”

One can then imagine Lovecraft, as he fell asleep in the cinema as he often did, softly chuckling to himself… “Ha, I did it first!”

The Street, 1923.