Rhode Island School of Design’s Pendleton Museum was a prime spot on the 1930s ‘Lovecraft tour’ of Providence, given to visiting members of the Lovecraft circle by Lovecraft himself. The Pendleton was an annexe to its main art galleries, one dedicated to colonial life as it had been lived, and it was thus a favourite Providence spot for Lovecraft.

Benefit Street, with the back end of the School of Art Museum and Pendleton House nestled alongside it on the right of the picture.

Pendleton Museum (or ‘Pendleton House’) was on Benefit Street but apparently had long had its public ‘entrance through Waterman St.’, rather than its own front entrance on Benefit. Here we see the arrangement on an early map. The map does not show the museum’s extension, present during Lovecraft’s life, which curved along the steep hillside and around Pendleton…

Public visitors would thus have had to walk through the Rhode Island School of Design galleries in order to reach the House. In “1897-8-9” the RISD entrance gallery at Waterman Street had been “an enchanted world” for the boy Lovecraft, due to the array of Greek and Roman reproduction sculpture.

In 1936, at the other end of his life, Lovecraft appears to have preferred the other end of the walk. Lovecraft told Galpin that he found the Pendleton Museum… “a perfect reproduction of a colonial mansion, containing the finest collection of American colonial furniture in the world.” There appears to them have been a connector in Lovecraft’s time, from the House to the newer art galleries on the slope below…

Attached to the north side of Pendleton House is a tiny arched, columned hexagonal adjunct no larger than a gazebo, with an interior dome. Exquisitely designed in the Neo-Renaissance manner, it provides the vestibule (out of the Pendleton House dining room) for Charles Platt’s stairway connector down the slope, through a (subsequently revamped) corridor gallery, also designed by Platt, to link the house with the so-called Waterman Galleries below.” (Society of Architectural Historians)

There were further additions. The Pendleton Museum was set to be matched with a long-anticipated new Colonial style courtyard garden, the Radeke Memorial Garden, but the project was delayed again and again until finally the plans for it were drawn up in 1933, and the Garden was not eventually realised until 1934. It was the sort of event and project that Lovecraft would have been on hand to support, and he had attended the opening of the Radeke museum extension in late April 1926. But I’m uncertain if he was also invited to the opening event for the garden. I have a vague recollection that he was there for the opening and he remarked that the garden was a little sparse in its initial planting (the opening event was sans plants but they were soon added). But I could be mis-remembering, and I can’t re-find the item.

I’ve now found good pictures of this garden, as Lovecraft would have experienced it in the years before his death as he took friends around the house, and presumably also the new garden. Though the 1934-37 planting was perhaps a little less established than seen in these newly colourised pictures. With thanks to the RISD Archive.

The statue in the niche is Pan depicted as a boy, woolly-shanked, cloven-hoofed and playing pipes. Lovecraft would surely have approved, and recalled his own sylvan boyhood shrines to Pan.

“There were in that Street many trees; elms and oaks and maples of dignity; so that in the summer the scene was all soft verdure and twittering bird-song. And behind the houses were walled rose-gardens with hedged paths and sundials, where at evening the moon and stars would shine bewitchingly while fragrant blossoms glistened with dew.” (Lovecraft, “The Street”)

The Radeke garden was restored to its original white scheme in the 1980s. It appears to be open to the public today (though may be found to be rented for weddings at weekends), and thus could be included on a Lovecraft-related tour of the city.

A fine picture of 257-267 Benefit Street, Providence, perhaps 1940s or 50s? Here I’ve newly colourised the picture. It gives a flavour of the street as Lovecraft knew it. With the NecronomiCon convention and Henry Armitage Symposium set to visit Providence again later this year, I thought a few posts on the sights (such as they can be seen on Google StreetView and old pictures) would be in order,

This was perhaps Lovecraft’s most cherished street, after his birthplace. We see here a better section, just past the Athenaeum and the College Street ‘crossroads’ with Benefit Street. The homes are still there today, although the street is marred by parked cars (sadly the AI that removes parked cars from street photos has not yet been invented)…

The pillared porches are now a painted a dull brown, presumably to hide the staining from the vehicle pollution. The once-fashionable cladding of living vines has been torn down from the brickwork.

By the look of it on the map, this would be the way that Lovecraft would have taken to walk from No. 66 down to the passenger-docks. There to meet Loveman or Morton — or anyone else who preferred to visit by the New York boat rather than by the railway.

A large part of the north section of Benefit Street was becoming slum-like in his time, with weedy and refuse-strewn gardens around rented houses, and tight shutters on un-let houses. Lovecraft would remark on…

northern Benefit street, whose appealing old houses and romantic topography merit a better fate than the slumdom now overtaking them.

This half of the street having been allowed to decay, in 1959 the city and Brown swooped in with plans to bulldoze the top of the hill, including Benefit Street. In favour of grim 1960s modernist tower-blocks. Thankfully the scheme failed. Thus some Lovecraft sites remain.

F.E. Seagrave had kept a substantial astronomical observatory at 119 Benefit Street in Lovecraft’s youth…

Mr. Seagrave, who is connected with the astronomical department of Harvard University, and who is one of the foremost astronomers of the present time, formerly had an observatory on Benefit Street in this city.” (Lovecraft, 1914)

And this was where Lovecraft would have moved into, later in his life. Had the opportunity to rent 66 College Street not arisen, he would have spent his last years alone in a rented room in…

the old Seagrave mansion where the noted astronomer F.E. Seagrave dwelt & had his private observatory until 1914

Instead, from his window at 66 College Street, the treetops of Benefit Street rimmed the sunset views of his city with the darkening cosmos above it.

Possibly Lovecraft had the worrying decline of this northern section of Benefit Street in mind when writing the political fairy-tale “The Street” in 1919. At 135 Benefit Street was “The Shunned House”, also the inspiration for his poem “The House”.

The decline continued, after his death. By the early 1940s the real-life street harboured a “vice palace”, raided by the FBI. A depressing novel of the time, set in a seedy boarding-house in the northern part of the street, provoked While Benefit street was young (1943) and The pageant of Benefit street down through the years (1945), publications which defended the street against the impression that all of its mile length was now a slum. By the 1960s restoration work on the supposedly ‘beyond repair’ houses in the northern section had begun, brick sidewalks were renewed by craftsmen along with the addition of more in-keeping lamp-posts.

Further along the street again, Ken Faig Jr. has Lovecraft’s uncle living and working as a doctor at 186 Benefit Street. Lovecraft’s funeral service was held opposite, at 187 Benefit Street. The grim irony of a funeral parlour facing a doctor’s house would not have escaped the young Lovecraft. What appears to be a city Armory would have been alongside the doctor’s house, adding another layer of irony. Aka the Benefit Street Arsenal, or the Marine Corp Armory. Not to be confused, it seems, with the much bigger State Armory which was also in Providence.

Judging by Google Street View, 186 Benefit Street is now a car-park, but 187 remains…

The Poe-haunted St. John’s Churchyard could be accessed off Benefit Street. His beloved Pendleton House (‘Colonial House’) and the neighbouring RISD Museum were at 224 Benefit Street (on which more next week).