I’ve been looking again through the Smithsonian’s collection of online pictures, now they number some 4.5 million. That compares with 2.5 million at launch.
A few finds…
1) There was a Ward Manor in Red Hook, NYC, of all places. Which may be of interest to Mythos writers. It evidently had antiquarian pretensions and ‘had a lake in the ravine’ in its near 1,000-acre grounds. At the time Lovecraft was in New York it was essentially disused by the owner who preferred to live on Long Island. One recalls the mysterious preserved estate in Lovecraft’s “He”. It was purchased from him in 1926 and fitted out as a children’s home, seemingly after Lovecraft had left the city and returned to Providence. All of which could be setting it up for a role in a Mythos story or RPG.
2) The month of May in the back-alleys of Columbia Heights. The locale was where Hart Crane and Loveman lived.
3) Provincetown waterfront, seen from the sea.
I stopped off at Boston for an all-day boat trip to Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod. This village I found to be somewhat overrated, but the sail – my first experience on the open sea out of sight of land – was well worth the price of the excursion. To be on limitless water is to have the fantastic imagination stimulated in the most powerful way. …” (24th September, 1930
Just over a year later he wrote “The Shadow over Innsmouth”.
4) Brown University Dept. of Mathematics, the “Great Dodecahedron”. Not the Trapezohedron of “Haunter”, but might Lovecraft have seen a range of such models on a visit with Morton? Including a Trapezohedron? Though doubtless Brown was not alone in modelling such things for display, and they would also have been seen in various museums of science and in magazines such as Popular Mechanics etc.
5) My various searches failed to discover an early ‘faery’ skyline of New York from near the Brooklyn Bridge, seen somewhat as Lovecraft had encountered it. The closest I could find at the Smithsonian was this nocturne by Johann Berthelsen, c. 1913.
6) A nice find. A vivid sketch-recording of “Snowstorm in the Village” (1925). Being Greenwich Village, New York City. Evocative of the harsh winters in New York City in those days. Lovecraft moved to his Red Hook room just a day or so before the biggest snowstorm in living memory hit the city (1st-3rd January 1925), so this is the same snowstorm. The central railway seen here is ‘the Elevated’, which Lovecraft often mentions in his New York letters.
This led me to this fine lithograph by Ellison Hoover, held elsewhere, depicting a circa late-1930s snowstorm. In the middle-ground is one of the key New York City libraries which Lovecraft frequented. I seem to recall this library was where he researched a lot of Supernatural Literature during the winter months of 1925/26. I find that New York also saw several very heavy record-breaking snowstorms in February 1926, though Lovecraft’s letters to his aunt at this time don’t mention any problems arising from these.