This week, yet another aspect of College Street as Lovecraft and his aunts would have known it. At the corner of Benefit and College Streets stood the headquarters of the Handicraft Club.

The artistically grown trees were apparently magnolias, and these later grew up substantially and when in leaf they obscure several later photographs of the frontage.

The Club was established there in 1905, and a rigorous approach soon attracted a healthy membership of skilled crafts workers. The place was extensive and there was a showroom and an annual exhibition of new crafts work.

It was here that one of Lovecraft’s aunts lived in 1927…

… half-way up [College Street] my aunt boarded in 1927 at the Handicraft Club in the old Truman Beckwith house. You doubtless recall that brick edifice and its old-fashion’d terraced garden.” (letter to Morton, Selected Letters IV)

S.T. Joshi writes of this period in I Am Providence…

We do not know much of what Lovecraft was doing during the first few months of his return to Providence [from New York City]. In April, May, and June [1927] he reported seeing several parts of the city he had never seen before, at least once in the company of Annie Gamwell, who at this time was residing at the Truman Beckwith house at College and Benefit Streets.

We do however know just a little of why his aunt might have been there. In 1925 the House had been purchased to serve as a “permanent home” (Handicrafts Of New England, page 321) as well as a clubhouse, and we can probably assume this was why Annie Gamwell could live there — if only for perhaps a single summer season of board and lodging. It seems plausible to assume that Lovecraft took the opportunity of his aunt’s residency to thoroughly appreciate the fine architecture. The Library of Congress has a detailed plan-book of the entire house, evoking all the details of the craftsmanship that Lovecraft would have thus admired. Though a photograph perhaps better evokes the interior that his aunt would have enjoyed at that time…

Atheist though he was, a few years later the mellowing Lovecraft was able to amiably enjoy an old traditional custom. Christmas 1933 found him listening to carols sung in the Handicraft Club courtyard…

Fixed up the sitting-room hearth with greens and surprised my aunt — and borrowed a cat for the occasion. Heard carol-singing in the early evening in the quaint cobblestoned courtyard of the Georgian Beckwith mansion (where my aunt was in 1927) halfway down the antient hill.” (letter to Morton, Selected Letters IV)

a turkey dinner at the boarding-house across the back garden & a stroll half-way down the hill to hear the carol-singing at the old Truman Beckwith mansion. I took the midnight coach & arrived in Manhattan the next morning —” (letter to Toldridge, Selected Letters IV)