This week on ‘Picture Postals from Lovecraft’, newly colourised views of 169 Clinton Street in 1935. These are two of the Sperr pictures, via the NYPL. 169 is the end residential building in the short row.

The building on the far right of the pictures had served as the New York Court of Special Sessions (of the Second Division, meaning Brooklyn, Queens and Richmond) since 1902… “The Second Division the Court of Special Sessions is now held at the corner of Atlantic avenue and Clinton street” at “171 Atlantic avenue”. The Court’s lease was renewed in 1922. This was the court for the trying of petty crimes. Meaning crime that merited either a fine, or some days in jail or in a youth reformatory. The presence of this court must have greatly increased the number of delinquent youths and low-life in the immediate vicinity of Lovecraft’s room, and on the sidewalks on the way to his nearby grocery store on the corner of Clinton and Atlantic.

One can just make out the “Tailor” sign, which may have been the Syrian tailor he mentioned and patronised. However, there was also a tailoring sign on might be small rentable units that ran down the side of the court building, so perhaps we can’t be quite sure. They may have been two tailors here, or one tailor with a shopfront and also a sign a bit further down the street.

The vacant and cleared lot was the site of the once lavish but later seedily decayed ‘Fouguera’ building, which was standing when Lovecraft lived at No. 169. 1934 was when the ‘slum clearance’ demolition boards went up on the ‘Fouguera’ building, as noted by the Brooklyn Eagle. Thus, walking down Clinton Street would have been a more canyon-like experience than the open sun-washed 1935 view above implies. Nevertheless, on a bright January day in 1925, it might not have looked too dark and gloomy…

Evidently in 1935 the roof had been changed and raised since 1926, to add the couple of attic rooms whose low windows we see in 1935.

This week on ‘Picture Postals from Lovecraft’, the old home of the Rhode Island Historical Society. No interior pictures that I can find though, which seems a pity. Still, here’s the exterior…

On the right we see the former home of the Rhode Island Historical Society, aka ‘The Cabinet’, and with the name carved above the entrance. Opened in November 1844, an event in which one William Gammell (Professor of Rhetoric) gave the opening address. Gammell was of course the family name of Lovecraft’s aunts. I don’t have the genealogical wizardry of Ken Faig Jr. at my fingertips, but I wonder if Prof. Gammell was somewhere in Lovecraft’s family tree?

The city’s Public Library was then able to furnish me with a bigger but rather more garish scan of a postcard using the same picture…

It housed the Society’s library, and by the early 1890s had added a two-story domed extension. At this point a booklet was produced titled The Library and Cabinet of the Rhode Island Historical Society (truncated scan) and which gave an overview of the contents of its special collections. The booklet reveals the Society held the “Whipple papers” for 1661-1791, which I guess might have been Lovecraft’s grandfather’s line? They certainly later took the papers of Lovecraft’s uncle…

After his death last year, the R.I. Historical Society took over his unpublished manuscripts.” (November 1916, Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner)

One wonders if they still have them? Has any Lovecraftian ever looked through them?

Anyway there we have two reasons why Lovecraft might have occasionally visited. Also noted by the 1890s booklet are 1,700 bound local newspaper volumes. There are no further details of the library holdings, which would have been beyond the scope of the booklet, but at that time it held 15,000 books and 35,000 pamphlets.

Then “Brown acquired the [old] building in 1942”, according to the current Brown Repository notes. I’m uncertain of the exact date of the move of the library but Joshi has…

At the very end of his life Lovecraft saw the opening of the John Brown house (1786) as a museum, and it is now the home of the Rhode Island Historical Society.” (Joshi, I Am Providence)

New home of the Historical Society.

“At the very end of his life” and the “1942” date both suggest that in the colour postcards above we see the location for the “Historical Society” that Lovecraft would have known and used, when he wrote things like …

I looked up the R. I. [Rhode Island] Casey line in J. O. Austin’s Genealogical Dictionairy of R. I. at the R. I. Historical Society. I hadn’t done any looking since over a year ago, and had never tackled this book before — but bless me…” (Selected Letters II, page 323).

This was written in March 1929, so “over a year ago” suggests he may have been there late 1927, for some post-“Dexter Ward” work.

Also note that in his “The Shunned House”…

I was forced to ransack both the Rhode Island Historical Society and and Shepley Library

And in Dexter Ward, Ward’s…

hours were spent mainly at home, in rambling walks, in his classes and drills, and in pursuit of antiquarian and genealogical data at the City Hall, the State House, the Public Library, the Athenaeum, the Historical Society, the John Carter Brown and John Hay Libraries of Brown University, and the newly opened Shepley Library in Benefit Street.

Today the ‘old’ Historical Society building is ‘Mencoff Hall’ (68 Waterman Street, Providence). Luxuriously renovated and modernised, expanded up to four floors, and now devoted to Brown’s advanced post-doc training in Population Studies — seemingly as the subject relates to disease and public health.

In a nice nod to history, today the Rhode Island Historical Society’s online catalogue is still called ‘The Cabinet’.

I’d welcome interior pictures of this pre-war ‘Cabinet’, if anyone knows of any.