Not much time this week for a long and research-heavy ‘Picture Postals’ post. But here’s a picture that continues last week’s theme of the view from Brooklyn of Manhattan. An early colonist looks across at the growing city, from the Brooklyn side of what would become Fulton Street. The crossing would long be served by a ferry, the ‘Fulton Street Ferry’. The ferry service seems to have been discontinued by the mid 1920s, thus severing the two streets in favour of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Possibly the flat-wide craft in the centre of the channel indicates the steam-powered ferry?

Lovecraft was fond of this sort of view for his own ‘early Providence’, and he would likely have appreciated this similar view from Brooklyn. The picture also reminds one of Lovecraft’s tale of the development of “The Street” from early times to 1919.

The men, busy with labour, waxed prosperous and as happy as they knew how to be. And the children grew up comfortably, and more families came from the Mother Land to dwell on The Street. And the children’s children, and the newcomers’ children, grew up. The town was now a city, and one by one the cabins gave place to houses; simple, beautiful houses of brick and wood, with stone steps and iron railings and fanlights over the doors.

Which might seem all quaint and antiquarian, but this is Lovecraft… so the horror creeps in more and more. Although the final horror is ultimately given only a superficial supernatural gloss, being a horror the inhabitants have made for themselves.