Skeleton Pete reports on a visit to The Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York City. More photos on Flickr. Lovecraft knew Roerich’s work and something of his ideas, and presumably met other Theosophists in New York, although he was never a believer. Indeed, he seems to have lumped most of the theosophists in with charlatan quackery like spiritualism. In a letter to Willis Conover, Lovecraft wrote of… “The crap of the theosophists, which falls into the class of conscious fakery”. His use of whacky ideas from Theosophy is explored in Robert M. Price’s 1982 article “HPL and HPB: Lovecraft’s Use of Theosophy” (available online). He did have good words to say about Roerich however…

“Possibly I have mentioned to you at various times my admiration for the work of Nicholas Roerich — the mystical Russian artist who has devoted his life to the study & portrayal of the unknown uplands of Central Asia, with their vague suggestions of cosmic wonder & terror … surely Roerich is one of those rare fantastic souls who have glimpsed the grotesque, terrible secrets outside space & beyond time, & who have retained some ability to hint at the marvels they have seen.” — 21st/22nd May 1930 to Lillian D. Clark.

“…old Nicholas Roerich, the Russian painter whose weird Thibetan landscapes I have so long admired” — Selected Letters: 1932-1934.

“…good old Nick Roerich, whose joint at Riverside Drive and 103rd Street is one of my shrines in the pest zone [New York City]” — letter to James F. Morton, March 1937.

Roerich lived to 1947, so the date on the latter letter suggests Lovecraft may have known him well in the mid 1930s, when he often visited New York just after Christmas. “Good old” was usually a Lovecraft-ism used for things like cinemas or old men or old cats, meaning they were “reliable” in their warm welcome and hospitality.

Above: Nicholas Roerich, “Armageddon, 1936”.

A new consolidated gallery of photographs of H.P. Lovecraft in chronological order, created as a 2011 birthday tribute.

1925 — Standing in front of 169 Clinton Street, Brooklyn, New York City.

When Mr. H.P. Lovecraft stepped down onto the platform of the Pennsylvania Station, on his first ever visit to New York in April 1922, he was surrounded by the neo-gothic imagination in the very architecture of the place. Architecture critic Vincent Scully once famously said of the station’s vaulting interior…

“One entered the city like a god”

Here the power of the literary imagination to change reality with the pen was literally all around him, as he walked up from the platforms into the area covered by the immense vaulted glass and steel roof. The gothic revival had been widely popularised via Walpole’s sensational horror novel (followed by others), and the great boom in ‘the neo-gothic in architecture’ that followed had in short order changed the very fabric of the larger cities…

There then appears to have been a transition into more and more immense Roman styles (no doubt also enjoyed by Lovecraft, who considered himself a sort of ‘Roman via Britain’) as if one were making the journey of civilisation from the underworld to the light in just a few minutes…

“murmurous with the immense and distant sound of time. Great, slant beams of moted light fell ponderously athwart the station’s floor, and the calm voice of time hovered along the walls and ceiling of that mighty room, distilled out of the voices and movements of the people who swarmed beneath. It had the murmur of a distant sea, the languorous lapse and flow of waters on a beach. It was elemental, detached, and indifferent to the lives of men… Few buildings are vast enough to hold the sound of time, and… there was a superb fitness in the fact that one which held it better than all others should be a railroad station.” — Thomas Wolfe , from You Can’t Go Home Again, describing the old Pennsylvania Station.

… but there was also that weird ceiling, like a giant alien spaceship, perhaps emblematic of the inheritance the West had had from places such as Byzantium?…

Lower Clinton Street, Near East River, NYC, 1941. Is this the right Clinton St. for Lovecraft?

More here

The present-day location of Lovecraft’s “dismal” room at 169 Clinton Street. It was then on the fringes of the Red Hook slum area. The Brooklyn Heights blog explains…

“Lovecraft’s description of 169 Clinton, at the corner of State Street, as “at the edge of Red Hook” may seem odd to Heights residents today, but in the 1920s “Red Hook” included all or much of what we know now as Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens, as well as what we now call Red Hook.”