H.P. Lovecraft lived at 10 Barnes St., Providence, from 1926 to May 1933. Since the mid 1890s, Barnes Street had a large 75 million gallon reservoir looming up at the back of it. Even if Lovecraft had become habituated to the sight and vicinity of this reservoir, he cannot have been unaware of it when writing “The Colour out of Space” in March 1927. You’ll recall the story involves a planned reservoir, and potential contamination of the urban water-supply. The story was written about a year after he had moved to 10 Barnes St.

Hope St. reservoir and pumping station.

Was the reservoir still full at that time? Probably partly full, but possibly no longer being pumped with fresh water — and thus emitting a certain invisible miasma over the neighbouring streets by early spring 1927. Because according to a Providence magazine of early 1928 the reservoir was then being decommissioned and its slow drainage was well underway… it “is not yet dry, but it will soon be; the city may make use of the site of the big pool for school purposes”. It may have been used as a school sports area, but other reports indicate it remained undeveloped at Lovecraft’s death. The pumping station/house was decommissioned in July 1928.

Lovecraft lived a little off the left of this picture-map, which shows the reservoir and Barnes Street. Looking at another map, it appears that Lovecraft’s high school directly faced the reservoir. He must surely have been familiar with its existence, even if he never walked up there and peered down into its fishy depths.

It would take work at the local archives to discover more, and the exact dates at which the slow drainage started. I assume it takes a year or so to slowly drain something like that, as rapid drainage could cause landslips and catastrophic spillage etc. But from the dates we do have it appears we can be fairly sure that Lovecraft would have taken note of the city’s plans to drain the reservoir, and possibly the start of the drainage, at about the time of the writing of “The Colour out of Space”. If the two were connected or not is now lost in the mists of time.

Update:

Thanks to Tom Douglass, local historian, who writes…

“I believe you are right about the connection you draw between the two, and perhaps more directly than you stated. … When Scituate’s water treatment facility came online in 1926, the Hope pumping station was decommissioned.”

So it’s interesting that the two events – draining Hope and filling Scituate – should be so closely connected. Lovecraft later recalled in a letter that the filling of Scituate was the key inspiration.