This week on ‘Picture Postals from Lovecraft’, more Boston pictures. Rectified, cleaned and toned.

Firstly another contender for the Boston subway which is depicted toward the end of the dreamlike prose-poem “Nyarlathotep” (1920), in which a column of people…

filed down a weed-choked subway entrance, howling with a laughter that was mad.

This is the subway inbound entrance that sat beside the Boston Public Library, seen here in 1915. Suitably gothic and Lovecraftian, more so than the one seen last week. Lovecraft almost certainly knew this Library entrance after 1919.

Then there’s his “Pickman’s Model” (1926), in which the artist depicts a scene in the Boston subway and names the station…

There was a study called ‘Subway Accident,’ in which a flock of the vile things were clambering up from some unknown catacomb through a crack in the floor of the Boylston Street subway and attacking a crowd of people on the platform.

Here is a picture of the subway station itself. It may have had two platforms, one for the subway…

And another where the Elevated train came down and in, to meet the subway at a wooden platform…

Elevated -to- subway platform.

So take your pick as to which one the “vile things” were emerging from and into. But the older wooden-slats one feels the more likely. Note the news-stand with magazines, albeit some 11 years before Lovecraft was (probably) sitting there and imagining ghouls emerging from the trackway.

Where They lurk…