The card shows the old and the new Turks Head.
Just across the street from here was the Dana Bookshop. This bookshop, and possibly some lingering Lovecraft materials, was burned and flooded out just as the Lovecraft revival was getting underway. Lovecraft knew it as the “Old Corner Bookshop” (Letters to Family, p. 612), and named it such in recalling the poignant sight of his mother’s books on display and for sale in the window. Later the Dana shop took some of Lovecraft’s own Library after his death. There is no vintage photo of the shop-front that I can find, so the postcard of the adjacent Turks Head building must suffice.
Here are some reminiscences of the bookshop…
“Wonderful old things continued to vanish [from Providence in the late 1960s]. During my first few weeks at Brown. when I knew nobody, I used to walk most days at lunchtime front my office down College Hill and crossing the Providence River [by the long bridge, no longer there,] I would gawk my way down Weybosset Street. There I would have lunch at the almost deserted lunch counter of the Weybosset Market [only] a bit larger than a mom and pop store. There was sawdust on the floor: ancient fans whirred overhead. […] Dana’s, a wonderful secondhand bookstore run by a most elderly couple […] in the basement of the Wilcox Building where there was a serious fire in the early 1970s. The bookstore was technically saved. but the water damage was so extensive that Mrs. Dana was forced to dispose of her water logged stock and go out of business. Dana’s had wonderful nineteenth-century children’s books.” — Abbott Gleason, A Liberal Education.
“… the wonderful old Dana’s Book Shop which was in the financial district of Providence just across the street from the Turks Head building. I would stop there now and then on my lunch hour […] I once got treated to a ride to their store room on the 3rd or 4th floor of the ancient building they were in, and the elevator was one of the old 1910 era hydraulics with a rope running down the middle. The elevator operator would pull on the ropes, without too much effort and we would go up or down as needed. This was around 1970.” — James Pannozzi.
“The reek of wet ashes and smoke greeted us harshly as soon as we reached the canal. Crossing over, we began to feel the heat before we were able to see exactly what was burning. The closer we got, however, the more sickeningly I felt that I knew. And I wailed aloud when I saw I was right. The fire was speedily gutting part of an old business block, unbelievably right on Weybosset Street, where everything was brick and granite. Flames roared out from shattered windows, illuminating a modestly ornate 1880’s facade [of the Wilcox Building …] Under the torrential discharge of the fire hoses, the inferno was successfully contained. […] Books lay sodden and trampled all over the street and in the gutters. Dana’s, housed in the basement, must have flooded quickly under the hose-attack. A vintage copy of Alice in Wonderland, matted and splayed, was close by my feet. […] finding [Dana’s had been like finding] a bit of London, magically landed in Providence. I lived for those afternoons when I could escape here, with my two or three bucks in my pocket, and idle away the time till rush hour…” — C.A. Bourdon, Charleyville Revisited (fiction, though seemingly semi-autobiographical).
Fine Books later had an article-memoir on the store…
“The shop was on the ground floor of the building, entered from street level down a few steps. […] when the great hurricane of 1938 flooded downtown Providence it escaped, but just barely, as the floodwaters lapped at its bottom edges. The surviving stock had then been moved up to a storeroom on an upper floor [which by the 1960s had become] an enormous warehouse-like room filled with thousands of books, all neatly categorized and shelved, just as in an open bookstore. My jaw dropped at the sight – for me it was like stumbling into King Tut’s tomb, or Ali Baba’s cave. […] Sadly, the building housing Dana’s burned just a few years later and the bookstore, with nearly all of its stock, was destroyed. Ironically, the books in the ground floor shop itself didn’t burn, but were lost to water damage, once again. As for the storeroom upstairs, no mention is made of it in accounts of the fire.” — Martin J. Murphy.
The Wilcox Building is mentioned above, but a 1970s photo shows the ornamented Wilcox Building and adjacent Equitable Building…
the Equitable Building incorporates the Victorian custom of splitting the street-level tenants in half – a shop half a floor down and the principle business half a floor up. At the right is the Wilcox building.
This view must be of Weybosset because the L-shaped building having two frontages, and another source remarks on the “delightfully asymmetrical, sculpturally ornamented one on Weybosset Street”.
Given the Fine Books recollection that… “The shop was on the ground floor of the building, entered from street level down a few steps” this suggests that it could have been on the lower-ground ‘exposed basement’ floor of the Equitable Building seen here.
Yet a 1890s picture hints at a possible down-steps in the centre of the adjacent Wilcox Building…
A 1980s(?) picture of the same spot…
Then a further recollection of the Dana Bookshop places it definitely in the “basement” of the Wilcox Building…
“I discovered a used bookstore called Dana’s, in the basement of the Wilcox Building. They had children’s books from the 1800s, ones I’d only heard about reading other children’s books. Alas, before I ever had the money to make acquisitions, the Wilcox Building caught fire. Dana’s was spared the fire, but the water damage destroyed all those lovely books.” — memories of the 1960s in Providence, by Linda M. Young.
The Antiquarian Bookman journal for summer 1966 gives its address as “Dana’s Old Corner Book Shop, 44½ Weybosset St.” And indeed on Google Streetview this address takes one to the expected place, with “44” seen painted on the shopfront window-glass…
Thus the top two floors of the Wilcox Building are the resting (and burning) place of the last of Lovecraft’s library.
The city’s preservationists recorded the Wilcox Building’s neo-Gothic frontage in a detailed description in 1969, shortly before the fire…
“The Wilcox Building, designed by Edwin O. Howland, dates from 1875. It is one of the city’s first office buildings in the polychromatic High Victorian Gothic style. This L-shaped structure, built around the Equitable Building, has facades on Weybosset and Custom House Streets. The brick facades are trimmed with stone and their regular fenestration serves as a pattern from which a complex decorative scheme is elaborated. The ground floor of the Weybosset Street elevation is arcaded; the voussoirs of its segmental arches are alternate-blocks of pudding stone and grey granite. The capitals of the piers and polished granite columns are richly carved with foliage, flowers and birds. More abstract motifs embellish the stone belt courses and fancifully-shaped window caps of the upper stories. The Weybosset Street facade is accented by a slight projection of the two right hand window bays, terminated by a fake gable rising above the otherwise flat roofline. “The Wilcox Building” is inscribed above the third-story windows of this tower-like projection.”