This week on ‘picture postals’, a hunk o’ the actual place. Fulton Street, Brooklyn, to be exact. Or as good as, in the form of a .PNG cutout (i.e. on transparency) for Tentaclii readers.
This follows on from last week’s discovery of the location of Lovecraft’s fave restaurant at 7 Willoughby Street, just around the corner from Fulton.
Preview: 
Download: fulton-st-cutout.png
Also, a couple of Willoughby Street ‘out-takes’ from my recent posts on John’s. These are ten years before Lovecraft’s New York sojourn, and are from the 1915-16 pictures made to forestall any damages litigation before the subway was dug.
Here we look along Willoughby Street, in 1915, from what is now No. 15 down to No. 1. The theatre (by then a cinema) is still on the corner at that point, but by Lovecraft’s time in the city would have become the Edison Electric Co. office building that still stands today as No. 15. The Elevated railway can be seen in the distance, as it swings around the Brooklyn Citizen newspaper building and heads down Fulton. The second barber pole seen here about marks the site of 7 Willoughby Street, later John’s, and part of its “Hungarian Restaurant” sign can be seen.
Here we look across the foot of Willoughby Street at that same point in time. The spot is seen on the bird’s-eye view.
The Brooklyn Citizen newspaper building is in the immediate foreground on the left, and their hoarding gives the news headlines. It looks like three newspaper hawkers are waiting for the early-morning newspaper bundles to land on the sidewalks. Behind the edge of the Citizen we can just see the signs that indicate the start of Willoughby Street, including Bristol’s restaurant at No. 3. The middle-distance of the picture shows roughly the stores that would have been opposite John’s. Note that the run of stores directly opposite are neatly boarded up, presumably in advance of the subway work, and (as seen on other pictures) their frontages tell people to use an entrance around on Fulton.
The Elevated railway on the right of the picture heads down into Fulton, but we see a passenger stop and the steep stairs up to the platform. Perhaps this was a frequent station for Lovecraft and friends, when John’s was the “spaghetti headquarters”… though of course the trains it served may have been headed the wrong way for some of the ‘gang’. The bird’s-eye postcard view, however, also reveals a station platform opposite and going the other way.
“Sunday morning elevated”, Lovecraft on the platform of the Elevated.