The Riverside Drive scene on the card is almost certainly where we could have tragically lost Lovecraft in 1927, as he explains…
Just about a decade ago I began refusing to take dares beginning with the time a friend challenged me to walk along the foot-wide & not-quite level parapet of upper Riverside Drive in New York, with a 500-foot perpendicular drop to ragged rocks & railway tracks on one side.
“B.P.” usefully summarises the layout in the 1920s…
The first portion of Riverside Drive from 72nd to 85th Street was opened in 1879. Riverside Park terminated at 129th Street. The Riverside Viaduct completed in 1900, bridged the schism between 125th and 135th Streets. […] Above 168th Street Riverside Drive became somewhat rural [and] continued north to 181st Street.
Here we see the railway tracks…
What of Hulyer’s? The map places 60 West 125th Street about a mile south-east from the bridge shown. But it also reveals that this Huyler’s branch was just a half-mile south from Morton’s apartment (which was at 211, West 138 Street). We now know from the Letters to Family letters that there was at least one nightime Kalem Club meeting at Morton’s place. My guess that it was held there because it was high summer, and Morton likely had access to the flat roof of his terrace row (he had a very indulgent landlord). In and around Red Hook there was almost no access to the building roofs, as reported by an official slum report on the gangs of the district. Lovecraft’s 1925 diary also shows there he made at least one solo walk through Harlem to see Morton, and there were likely many other such walks. It’s thus not impossible, in the period when Sonia was helping out financially, that he and Morton could have dropped in on Morton’s best local soda, candy and ice-cream joint, even if it was further into central Harlem. The Huyler’s chain was very successful and appears to have been about the best one could get in terms of such drop-in stores.
Many Lovecraftians will also know the name Riverside Drive because it held a key Lovecraft “shrine” in New York City. This being the gallery of the visionary painter…
good old Nick Roerich, whose joint at Riverside Drive and 103rd Street is one of my shrines in the pest zone.
Maps put the gallery about a mile SW of the bridge seen in the above picture. Incidentally, nearby on the map is Morningside Heights, which explains Lovecraft’s 8th January 1925 telegraphic diary entry…
noon — meet LDC G.C.T. By. Exch. Ch. Art Gal. [Hatho?] Morningside & St Nick Hts. Ham. Gr. El. to G.C.T. Dinner St R. home. Tailor—Laundry Reading
Translated… he returns from the Leeds apartment after leaving there at 4am and walking across the Brooklyn Bridge and mailing some books and postcards on the way home. The next day he rises at noon, and meets “LDC” (Aunt Lillian) at the “G.C.T.” (Grand Central Terminus, aka Station) “By. Exch.” (Baggage Exchange?) some while later. They then visit the “Ch. Art Gal.” (City? Art Gallery). If “Hatho” indicates an unknown word, it could be a visit to Sonia’s “Hat House”, her hat store? The weather is presumably good and so they make for Riverside Drive bridge and walk a mile down the “Morningside” riverside section to see “St. Nick”, this being Nick Roerich and his gallery. The “Hts.” may be a mis-transcription for Mts, indicating Roerich’s mountain paintings. Then “Ham. Gr.” (Harlem to see Morton?, Greenwich Village?). Then they take the “El.” (elevated line) back to Grand Central Station and have a dinner there. They then take the “St. R.” (street railway, in contrast to the ‘elevated’) home. Lovecraft sorts his clothes in need of tailoring (his aunt had likely pointed out something in need of fixing) and for the laundry-service bag, and then he reads into the night.
Placing the three points on a map (bridge, Morton, the gallery) suggests that, once he was at Morton’s place, it would then be natural to walk with Morton a mile to the west through what is now marked as “West Harlem” to reach the Riverside Viaduct bridge. From the “Heights” there he and Morton could walk a mile south down the pleasant Riverside Drive (alongside the Hudson River) to reach Roerich’s gallery, and he knew that section of the route well enough to make it a prime walk with his aunt in January 1925. Possibly he and Morton occasionally walked on 2.5 miles down the same riverside, to reach McNeil’s Hell’s Kitchen district — possibly enabling a visit to McNeil. Though I’m not sure how salubrious the riverside walk would then have been, once it was south of 72nd Street, and how safe to then walk from the waterfront into Hell’s Kitchen. Public transport from the Roerich gallery might have been the safer option.
I’ve also found another card of a possible eatery. Safely back in Providence, Lovecraft no doubt dropped in at least once to sample the new “Franklin Spa”. This had been built while he was away in the big city (see the “1926” emblazoned on its frontage). It was about a quarter-mile south of the Public Library, in an area now swept away by a new concert hall.
