It was through a ‘Hell Gate’, appropriately enough, that H.P. Lovecraft entered New York City for the first time. The Hell Gate. In Letters to Family (p. 420), a September 1925 letter explains that…

[Queens Plaza] was the very first spot on Long Island that I ever saw; being at the portal of the great Hell Gate railway bridge, over which rolled my train on my initial metropolitan advent of April 1922.

Here are two pictures. One indicates and evokes the approach to this bridge, while the other looks down and off to the side of it.

The view has Hell Gate bridge on the far right, and the Queensboro Bridge on the left. The river is out of sight, down below both. Typically, Lovecraft tells his aunt that he recalls that in 1922 he had immediately noted from the train window “a huddle of nondescript wooden houses” down below, and filed them away for some future moment of antiquarian investigation. These later proved to be the “old time Astoria”. So his antiquarian interest in New York City had begun even before he stepped off the train in 1922.

The bridge is also known as Hells Bridge or Hell’s Bridge, Hell Gate Bridge, or the Hellbridge.

Lovecraft’s 1926 letter continues, describing a sight just seen on the same route…

I noticed en route [to Queens Plaza, across the Hell Gate in September 1926] a very attractive sight — the misty skyline of New York all grey and fairy-like as on the first occasion of my seeing it, three and a half years ago. The Queensboro Bridge loomed up deliciously in the middle-distance […] & the whole was glorified by slanting shafts of sunlight […] which dropt from an opening cloud to the vaporous regions of earth.

We actually have a fine mid-1930s National Archives public-domain picture of almost this very view… from the foot of the Hell Gate pilings, looking through the Queensboro Bridge at the grey towers of New York City in the distance beyond. I’ve here cleaned and toned it.