A return to New York City for this week’s ‘Picture Postals’. To Columbia Heights, and the view of the river and city from there.

Here we see a preliminary study in oils of New York Bay from the rooftops of Columbia Heights, 1923. The artist is unknown. Samuel Loveman was living at 78 Columbia Heights from 1924, near Hart Crane who had then been at 110 Columbia Heights for some years. It was from the latter address, on his first visit, that Lovecraft had…

my first sight of the illuminated Manhattan skyline [being] from its roof!

Thus this picture gives some notion of what that view might have been like, albeit in the daytime and looking away from the city towers and from the famous Brooklyn Bridge.

We get a feel for the other side of the view from this rooftop picture of the poet Hart Crane at No. 110.

Those wishing to track down a really good glass-plate early-1920s view at night should be able to triangulate from this. To see how close the Brooklyn Bridge view is to the elevation and distance seen here. The above painting should also help with location. For a view featuring one of the most photographed bridges in history, the chances seem good of finding a large panorama picture made in the early evening circa 1916-1926.

Over time Columbia Heights was the site of one of several evening ‘dream-visions’ of the city towers, ethereal and faery in the river-mists at dusk with the lights coming up. Lovecraft at first found the city…

delightful to visit on account of its faery pinnacles & wealth of museums & the like

The Woolworth Tower, seen here at night in 1923 perhaps exemplifies the spirit of Lovecraft’s views, if not the actual initial view of massed towers across the water as seen from Columbia Heights. Though Lovecraft did also ascend this tower, then the highest skyscraper yet built in the city, and would have had many ground-level and Elevated railway views of it in the dusk from various angles.

Despite his later sentiments about the city, Lovecraft still sighed in 1933 when he recalled his old response to such sights…

I shall never find another Dunsanian city of wonder as utterly unreal & linked with incredible cloud-mysteries as the exotic & unexplored labyrinth of sea-born towers that was the dim, half-fabulous Manhattan of 1922.

Of course his later experiences of living in the city year-round gave him quite another view of the place, and it became for him “the pest zone”. The experience left with him with…

the abiding terror of him who comes to New-York as to a faery bower of stone & marble, yet finds only a verminous corpse — a dead city of squinting alienage

Again, an old postcard helps evokes this sentiment — Luna Park (Coney Island) at night with gargoyle-dragons…