Category Archives: Maps

‘Picture postals’ from Lovecraft: a mixed bag from Brookyn

24 Friday Jun 2022

Posted by in Maps, New discoveries, Picture postals

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This week in my ‘Picture Postals’ series of posts, more follow-on from my recent successful search for Lovecraft’s “John’s” in Brooklyn.

1) Here are two Photoshop-combined sections of Sanborn’s 1904 Brooklyn Atlas, showing 7 Willoughby Street (John’s) in plan and context.

We can see here that No. 7 (“John’s”) had a large isolated yard and sheds out back. This is possibly of relevance re: it being a suitable-looking site for prohibition hooch-brewing in the back yard, something which we know went on regularly at the main branch of John’s. Note the adjacent cigar making, carpet cleaning and gas-fitting. Alcohol fumes from the stills might have been well cloaked by the neighbouring pongs. Possibly there was also a back-entrance to the yard, for small trucks using the insalubrious Union Lane. Looks to me like a perfect site for prohibition brewers in 1925.

2) In my recent search for Lovecraft’s Clinton St. grocery, I can now discount the store on the ‘bank’ corner of Atlantic Avenue – Clinton Street. You’ll recall there was a savings bank on one of the four possible corners, a bank that had departed the area in 1922. A 1927 picture shows that a corner store there, visible on that corner in the early 1940s, was not yet in existence at 1927. This discovery further confirms that Lovecraft’s grocery store was at 156 Atlantic Avenue, on the corner with Clinton.

In the same set of pictures there is a 1935 picture of 156 Atlantic Avenue. This is in one of the same set of Sperr pictures, Brooklyn: Clinton Street – State Street. But this picture has been confusingly titled. Its title implies that it shows State Street but it does not, as the label on the back indicates. It is merely “south from State Street”, i.e. made at a point south ‘on the map’, but with State St. behind the cameraman. To someone who knows what they’re looking at, this April 1935 picture shows Lovecraft’s Clinton – Atlantic Avenue corner, as seen from the waste-ground of the demolished Fougera apartments. Thus Lovecraft’s grocery is partly visible behind parked cars, on the very far right of the picture…

Regrettably this is one of the Sperr pictures that the NYPL hold hostage for their expensive “fine art prints” racket.

3) Also in the Sperr pictures, I found a better angle in a picture that looks down Clinton Street. Brooklyn: Clinton Street – Atlantic Avenue, early June 1927. A date which was little more than a year after Lovecraft had returned to Providence. The druggist (chemist) is on the corner with its awnings up against the sun, and Lovecraft’s Clinton St. is falling away at the left of the picture, as seen below. Lovecraft’s room at No. 169 is on the far corner, slightly obscured by a nearer lamp-post. Sperr’s label on the back has a description and the “June 1927” date. I think this may be the first time this particular picture has been identified with No. 169, and it’s very close in time.

Sadly it’s another of the Sperr pictures that the NYPL hold hostage for their “fine art prints”. Online it is very low-res, but apparently the NYPL do have larger as a very expensive “art print” — and seemingly with no actual guarantee that the image quality will be any better. You might end up with a $150 blur.

However, discovering that the corner building had once been the “Brooklyn Atheneum” aka “Athenaeum” opened doors to new data, and I found more or less the same view on a Brooklyn Eagle postcard…

Late 1890s. The Brooklyn Historical Society hold the plate.

We can see “Heyder[eich?]” the druggist was there on the corner in the late 1890s, as he was in the 1935 and 1940 pictures of the same corner. He appears to have been there all the way through, circa 1890s-1940.

What of the Atheneum? The Atheneum had once been a large concert hall, assembly rooms and then a private mercantile subscription library, and there was indeed a druggist on the corner (a chemist shop, as I had suspected). Its heyday as a modern venue was the 1850s-70s, and later as a theatre and lantern-projectionist forum in the 1880s. Nothing is heard of it after that as a regular cultural venue. But there was an attempted mass-meeting of East Coast anarchists there in 1901, as a result of which… “police closed down the Athenaeum”. The building was then swiftly leased by the New York Court of Special Sessions (of the Second Division, meaning Brooklyn, Queens and Richmond). “The Second Division the Court of Special Sessions is now held at the corner of Atlantic avenue and Clinton street” at “171 Atlantic Avenue”. Rather too swiftly occupied, since the officers complained for several years about the badly leaking roof, until the place was eventually refurbished. The Court’s lease was renewed in 1922, the year when the building was sold to a new owner by what a real-estate trade-paper called the “old” Athenaeum. The new owner appears to have been making a long-term investment on the corner site rather than the creaky old building — it was listed for demolition as part of “slum clearance” and abruptly demolished in 1942.

When Lovecraft was living at No. 169 this corner of Clinton and Atlantic was thus a court for the trying of petty crimes. Crime that merited either a fine, or some days in jail or a youth reformatory. It may not have sat as a court every day, but its presence would often have ‘flavoured’ the surrounding sidewalks with a seedy and anxious atmosphere.

The Athenaeum’s final days are seen here, photographed circa 1941-42 by Irving Kaufman, with the demolition placard on the front…

Old Brooklyn Athenaeum / Second Division of the Court of Special Sessions, before demolition. Also Clinton Street and No. 169. Photo by Irving Kaufman (1910–1982). Kaufman’s son Phil Kaufman was until a few years ago able to provide prints. But Phil Kaufman’s website has now gone, and at the time he posted these prints he did not know where they had been photographed. Just that they showed large Brooklyn buildings that were declared for demolition.

Here the old corner druggist has gone at last and the store has become an opportunistic grocer, “American **st Grocers(?)”, for a year or so before demolition. But this is long after Lovecraft’s time there. Still, it gives us another new picture looking down toward No. 169 Clinton St. and we get a feel for Lovecraft’s walk up to his Syrian tailor’s and to the corner, before crossing Atlantic to reach his usual grocery store.

In a further Irving Kaufman picture we can also see the immense ‘Fouguera’ apartments building that loomed opposite Lovecraft in Clinton St. This picture shows the other side of the street, and a distinctive corner of the druggist’s frontage can be seen in the bottom-right (it has a ‘pig snout’ moulding that can’t be mistaken). Comparing the styling of this frontage, just visible enough, with the 1935 and circa 1940 pictures to show that it it not yet the grocer’s seen in the circa 1941 picture. In that latter picture the grocer has re-tooled the signage boards somewhat. This ‘Fouguera’ photo must be earlier than circa 1941. Indeed, it must be circa 1934-35 because 1934 was when the ‘slum clearance’ demolition boards went up on the building, as noted by the Brooklyn Eagle. These boards can be clearly seen on the building.

We can also more clearly see the nature of the corner shop at the ‘Fouguera’. It was a furniture store with what seems to be an antique bric-a-brac wing with a show-window on the corner.

To summarise, my search for Lovecraft’s grocery has found the store, and has also established several other useful facts along the way. Lovecraft would have walked toward the grocers on Clinton/Atlantic through a ‘canyon’ like street, with the immense ‘Fouguera’ on one side, and the old Brooklyn Athenaeum on the other. If he walked from his room into this canyon during the day he might have encountered many people going to or from the Second Division the Court of Special Sessions, Brooklyn’s court for petty crime that was held in that building. Such anxious or hard faces cannot have raised his general assessment of the immediate area. Culture and thrift was fading away. The old Athenaeum had gone, the Saving Bank on its opposite corner across Atlantic had departed in 1922 (and seemingly also the artists who had some sort of informal studio colony above it). The once proud ‘Fouguera’ was (in the eyes of the city) now becoming the slum that would condemn it in 1934 and with a seedy-looking furniture store and a seedy cafe below. The old druggist on the Athenaeum corner, “Heyder[eich?]”, kept up the tone. The grocery at No. 156 Atlantic Avenue was worth patronising and affordable, and presumably friendly. But the area was obviously going downhill despite a superficial aura of fading quality, as Lovecraft’s letters also evidence.

Map showing Lovecraft’s room at 169 and the four corners of Clinton/Atlantic. Clockwise: ‘Fouguera’ and bric-a-brac shop; Athenaeum (now the petty-crimes court for Brooklyn) and Druggist; the old Savings Bank (lower part not a store until after 1927); and then the grocery at 156 Atlantic.

Lovecraft’s maps

03 Friday Jun 2022

Posted by in Lovecraftian places, Maps, Scholarly works

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Along with the forthcoming mega-index to the completed volumes of Letters, it struck me that we could also use a companion volume containing maps. ‘Orienting’ maps, in outline but still somewhat detailed. Map that quickly tell readers where one place was in relation to another. I’d suggest the following:

1. Lovecraft’s Providence (the topography and places known as a boy)

2. Lovecraft’s Providence (post-1914).

3. Lovecraft’s College Hill and Marketplace (including tunnels).

4.   ”  Places near Providence (Dark Swamp etc).

5.   ”  Brooklyn.

6.   ”  New York City.

7.   ”  New England coastline.

8.   ”  Dots-on-the-map. A general ‘dot-map’ of Lovecraft’s excursion and trip destinations east of the Mississippi and up into Canada.

9.   ”  Florida and his southern excursions.

10.   ”  Circle locations (their origins, places).

11.   ”  Far-flung Empire (his interest in particular far-flung places, places used in fiction etc).

Appendix: Map and mapping sources known to have been owned, used, consulted by Lovecraft.

Appendix: Bibliography of maps known to exist, relating to the original Lovecraft material (i.e. not the wider and later Mythos).

Appendix: List of important addresses in Lovecraft’s life.

Might be done in a suitable period style…

‘Picture Postals’ from Lovecraft: Durfee Hill and the Dark Swamp

20 Friday May 2022

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Following on from yesterday’s “Black Noon” post, this week’s ‘Picture Postals’ looks at Durfee Hill and the adjacent Dark Swamp. Lovecraft attempted to reach these places on expeditions with Morton or Eddy respectively.

Here is the best I can do with approximating the Dark Swamp location, via juggling an overlay of a modern road map and two approximately adjoining old USGS maps…

Dark Swamp was and still is just over a mile west of Durfee Hill and also just a touch south. Some old sources say it was in Exeter, others in Glocester [aka Gloucester]. No roads lead into it, it seems, even today. But it’s now specifically encompassed as part of the Durfee Hill Wildlife Management area. It appears from the map that, in 1923, the Swamp would have needed to be approached by a completely different road than the one running down to and over Durfee Hill. Even then, one might not find trails down to it, unless one was a hunter who knew the safe ways in and out.

A 1990s Rhode Island guide offers a rather useful tip for Lovecraftians looking to visit the wider Durfee wildlife reserve area in the autumn…

This is a hunting area so you [as a tourist] should not plan to visit in the fall.

Lovecraft and Eddy would have visited, had they reached the place, in October. Not only would the heavy rains of that year have made the place treacherous with bog-sumps and the like, but it seems that roving hunters could have presented a peril had the pair entered the dense darkness.

As for the adjacent Durfee Hill it was then considered the highest natural point in the state, commonly stated as being 805 feet in height at the summit. Lovecraft anticipated climbing it with Morton on a visit planned for late summer 1926…

Mortonius, of course, must have his Durfee Hill — for which stiffish jaunt I purpose to keep faithfully in training.

Possibly Morton was a ‘peak bagger’ (i.e. one who seeks to climb all the peaks in a district or state), but I have found new evidence that he may have wanted to visit in his role as a professional geologist…

The peak was rich in minerals, and had even once had a gold mine along a quartz-vein through the woods. Presumably the mine, later flooded, and its tailings yielded the source of the mineral samples being cited here.

However, despite Lovecraft and Morton being prepared, they never actually reached Durfee in September 1926. Morton, though a very experienced hiker, took a wrong turn and they unexpectedly ended up in Pascoag. One will recall that Pascoag is where Lovecraft had his “The Horror at Red Hook” open, a tale written at speed in 1925 in New York City.

NOT MANY WEEKS ago, on a street corner in the village of Pascoag, Rhode Island…

Lovecraft had been in Pascoag in September 1923 and, as I’ve shown elsewhere, he accurately described the fateful corner in “Red Hook”…

encountering the compact section, [Malone] had turned to his left into the main thoroughfare where several modest business blocks convey a touch of the urban.

But in September 1926 Lovecraft had a chance to more fully appreciate the place. Durfee’s loss was Pascoag’s gain, and he rhapsodised over “the early, half-forgotten, beautiful simple America” it presented, the America that Poe had known.

Their going astray may suggest to Lovecraftians that there was no opportunity to study large-scale USGS maps. Not even the well-provided Providence Public Library could, it would appear, furnish the expedition with the USGS sheets for a place so far out from Providence.

Interestingly the Durfee peak also has a part in Lovecraft’s famous “I am Providence” claim…

I am Providence, and Providence is myself — together, indissolubly as one, we stand thro’ the ages; a fixt monument set aeternally in the shadow of Durfee’s ice-clad peak!

Now… there’s an idea for the location of the homeless life-sized bronze statue of H.P. Lovecraft.

Given the ferocity of the New England winters his use of “ice-clad” was presumably no amusing hyperbole, but rather a matter of icy fact. Though curiously there never appears to have been a weather-station sited there. Nor any fire-tower that I can find, re: New England’s extensive post-1940s re-forestation.

The Cthulhu Prayer Society Newsletter, Vol. 1, No. 7 (November 2011) has a relatively recent account of Lovecraftians trying to reach the actual swamp, but the expedition had to concede defeat even with motor-transport, maps and compass. Their article is titled “The 1923 Quest for The Dark Swamp, Revisited: By Car and Foot in Chepachet & Glocester”. This article implies that Lovecraft hymned the view from Durfee thus…

Far as the Eye can see, behold outspread
The serried Hills that own no Traveler’s Tread;
Dome behind Dome, and on each flaming Side
The hanging Forests in their virgin Pride.

The poem is not so titled in The Ancient Track and thus may not have been about Durfee, though the lines might seem to imply it. I am however still a little uncertain if Lovecraft ever actually managed to climb this peak. He didn’t manage it in 1926 with Morton, nor it seems on the Dark Swamp expedition. Nor did he ever return with Morton / Eddy for a second try at either Durfee or the Dark Swamp, despite their having located some of the correct paths and turnings. I can find no other evidence that he ever got up to the summit. Many others also failed to do so, judging by the lack of vintage photographs, postcards or even accounts of reaching the summit. One would have thought that some enterprising young buck in the 1910s could have made an artfully-angled postcard of the state’s ‘highest point’, and sold a bundle. But no. Everyone knows it is there but, like the Dark Swamp, no-one ever seems to reach it.

In one letter, arguing with Morton about the new “Einstein theory”, Lovecraft even imagines Durfee…

… removed from the present planet and differently environed in the continuum of space-time.

“Black Noon”

19 Thursday May 2022

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“Letter to Weird Tales”, March 1924 (PDF). Lovecraft tells editor Baird of his new-found Providence pal Eddy, and their coming hike out in search of the mysterious Dark Swamp. Eddy had lingered in a corner-store in Chepachet and by chance overheard local lore about a vast ‘Dark Swamp’ west of Durfee Hill, which hunters said was always dark even at noon. And so…

Eddy began writing a story about it — provisionally entitled “Black Noon” — on the trolley ride home. Now we are both to see it … we are both to go into that swamp … and perhaps to come out of it. Probably the thing’ll turn out to be a clump of ill-nourished bushes, a few rain-puddles, and a couple of sparrows — but until our disillusion we are at liberty to think of the place as the immemorial lair of nightmare and unknown evil ruled by that subterraneous horror that sometimes cranes its neck out of the deepest potholes… It.

“Black Noon” was later partly written — although if from the original 1923 trolley-car draft/notes is unknown — by Eddy in 1967. He had earlier recalled something of the real Dark Swamp journey in his 1966 memoir (see Lovecraft Remembered). Eddy died before the “Black Noon” tale could be finished. It was however substantial enough to be published in…

* The Eddy collection Exit Into Eternity: Tales of the Bizarre and Supernatural, 1973, and 2000 reprint.

* The Robert M. Price edited miscellaneous anthology Acolytes of Cthulhu, 2001. Rights meant it had to be omitted from the later 2014 Titan reprint edition.

So far as I can discover, these are the only places it has been published. Derleth is said to have considered ‘finishing’ it as a tale, but didn’t.

Providence in 1920

17 Tuesday May 2022

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As automobiles became more common, the modern type of general outline map of a city became needed. Here’s an early one for Providence in 1920, which also now has its uses for orienting Lovecraftians. The dotted line in the harbour also indicates the sailing route of the ocean-going passenger ships from Fox Point.

‘Picture Postals’ from Lovecraft: Blackstone Park

11 Friday Mar 2022

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This week, not postcards but more postcard-like gems from the collection of the Boston Public Library. Here we see Providence’s imminent Blackstone Park, circa the early 1860s. The pictures were in a brochure proposing the establishment of the shore-front park. Blackstone Park was indeed established in 1866, but 40 years later it had become a delight for small boys — since the city had allowed it to fall badly… “into disuse and neglect by the early 1900s”. This was when the young free-range Lovecraft knew the place as a boy, and thought he glimpsed flute-playing fauns in its dappled depths.

I’ve colourised the picture. We have to imagine another 40 years of growth added to this, and trees consequently much larger above the grassy rides and rills. Perhaps some of these watery “brooklets”, as Lovecraft called them, were by then dried up in summer. Since drainage of College Hill and the adjacent shore-line was changed, as the city developed and the local ravines were filled in or blocked.

Here is Lovecraft on the Park, writing in 1918…

Scarce a stone’s throw from the house lie the nearest parts of that beautiful rustick reservation known as “Blackstone Park” — wherein I have been wont to wander some twenty or more years. Here Nature unadorn’d displays a multi-plicity of agreeable phases; ravines, groves, brooklets, thickets, & Arcadian stretches of river-bank — for the park borders on the wide & salty [river] Seekonk. … How beauteous indeed is untainted Nature as beheld in so idyllick a spot as Blackstone Park! … I think this park would explain why such a born & bred town man shou’d possess such a taste for rural musings & Arcadian themes!

Lovecraft occasionally took favoured friends there. Here he is in 1927…

the next day we [he and Cook and Munn] lounged about the Blackstone Park woods beside the Seekonk — agrestick haunt of my earliest infancy, and true genesis of my pastoral soul.

And in the mid 1930s he was sitting on the banks of the Seekonk… “Almost every warm summer afternoon” or else he took a short trip up in the “the fields & woods north of Providence”.

Below we see, from the same Boston collection, Blackstone Park’s grassy water-meadow. Most likely this is the “meadow” marked on one map as being roughly in the middle of the park, and located back across the road from the Boat Club house.

Above we also see the edge of the “meadow” area in winter flood, in the context of the Boat House and the shore road. The river Seekonk often flooded over, and thus the meadow would have been seasonally a boggy salt-meadow in its lowest section. It’s quite possible that this Boat House was the point from which the young Lovecraft set off on his solo rowing expeditions on the Seekonk. It was then a difficult and somewhat dangerous river to be out on in a small boat. Yet he became skilled enough with his boat and the river currents to land on the mud-squelching “Dagon”-like ‘Twin Islands’, so rarely shown on maps. Here is an exception.

This was the landscape of water and mud and washed-in sea-things which stirred his early nightmares of a drained Seekonk, and to which the genesis of his “Dagon” can be traced.

Modern seekers can note the boathouse and the site’s current drainage channel here on the right of the current map. It’s my recent composite of a 1972 bird’s-eye picture I found and a modern outline map of the Park. By 1972 the trees were crowding in. If the river’s salty winter over-wash has since been kept out, then I’m guessing they may have now fully colonised the old meadow.

“100 miles from my home”

12 Wednesday Jan 2022

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In a 1934 letter to Rimel, Lovecraft remarks… “I didn’t get more than 100 miles from my home until I was 31 years old” (i.e. circa 1922), which provides a useful limit of what he might or might not have seen as a boy, if only from a passing train. No glimpse of the sinister and misty Catskills (“Lurking Fear”) from a Hudson Valley train, then, on a trip with his grandfather.

Drawing a 100 mile circle from his home does however suggest possible youthful visits to…

* the vicinity of Portsmouth and Rochester in the north, via Boston.

* north-west as far as the Berkshire Hills and the river-towns that lie to the east of them.

* south-west along the coast to New Haven.

Lovecraft’s College Street in a game-engine

17 Tuesday Sep 2019

Posted by in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, Maps, Odd scratchings

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It strikes me that there are now enough pictures of College Street to be able to recreate this area in a 3D first-person videogame, following my picture-sourcing and resulting cavalcade of discoveries of the last week (see my posts and Patreon-only posts here at Tentaclii). Only Lovecraft’s central ‘garden court’ itself is still elusive in ground-level photography. [Update: Ken Faig has good maps showing precise boundaries around No. 66 and the location of the cat-shed].

A 3D recreation of the area could be set-dressed almost exactly as it would have been when Lovecraft was living at 66 College Street, complete with seasonal and atmospheric effects.

The game environment could also stretch all the way down College Street, as that other end of the street is well-documented visually — this section would usefully offer offices for an investigative RPG game. The resulting completed environment could then be released under GPL (open source), so that anyone could devise and build a game from that base environment. Or just virtually stroll around in it.

If “monsters n’ machine-guns” are felt to be needed then the could also be an underground element, re: the tunnels under the hill…

“Did we know, he asked, his sombre eyes intent on our faces, that recently, when early buildings on Benefit Street and College Street were razed to make way for new ones, deep tunnel-like pits, seemingly bottomless and of undetermined usefulness, were discovered in the ancient cellars?” — memoir of a visit by Lovecraft in 1934, by Dorothy C. Walter.

The disused Providence East Side Railway Tunnel under the hill could also feature. At the far end the tunnels could give access to the Seekonk River shoreline and perhaps even a short boat trip through heavy fog to the Twin Islands in the river. Wrapping the game’s horizons in a heavy Halloween fog and night would mean less work, re: making backdrops showing views of distant horizons.

The environment space I’ve outline above offers a fairly limited, and thus manageable, set of places:

The Paxton/Arsdale Boarding House.
The Carrie Tower.
Van Wickle Gate.
The lawns and reception on the main Brown University frontage.
The John Hay Library.
Lovecraft’s house, lane and garden.
The Alpha Delta Phi fraternity house.
The Providence Athenaeum.
Offices on lower College Street.
Court House on lower College Street.
Tunnels under College Hill.

Apart from a working looped tram (trolley-car) line, no vehicles would be required. A basic set of NPCs would be students and faculty, artists from the School of Design, various librarians and curators, and the more elderly retired residents. There would probably be a need to make and animate the tall elm trees and cats from scratch, but that’s not impossible for a talented game-making team. The Egypt-set edition of the Assassin’s Creed game has shown that convincing cats and cat-luring/petting can be done well in 3D videogames. All the rest of a game could be left to those who wished to build their game on top of this base game-world. A basic starting point for a game could be that the Cats of Ulthar have sent emissaries into the real world, seeking Lovecraft’s help in the Dreamlands, but then find themselves mute and treated as normal cats. Lovecraft is the only one who can ‘talk’ to the Ulthar cats, but only partially — even he must collect old lore and folklore that will enable him to speak with them.

Such a faithful and authentic recreation would probably do quite well on Kickstarter or similar. Especially if it was: i) to be made by a reliable team with some RISD and/or Brown endorsement; ii) the end result would be be GPL’d (open source); iii) and it would be made with a major free game-engine such as Unreal.

On Waterman Street: the Paxton/Arsdale

15 Sunday Sep 2019

Posted by in Historical context, Maps, New discoveries

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I’ve found a picture of the Paxton/Arsdale frontage. First, here’s the map oriented to the same viewpoint as the photographer…

Here we see the Waterman Street approach to the Brown University campus at the top of the hill, with the clock-tower in the distance. It’s 1909.

The twin pale buildings in the centre of the picture are the Paxton frontage. They have different roofs because they were once separate buildings, before being joined and painted alike. The resulting large boarding house was later called the Arsdale, then re-named again from 1946 as the male dormitory ‘Hopkins House’ housing some of the many Brown students returning from service in the Second World War. (My thanks to Ken Faig and David Schultz for discovering the later names of the place). Lovecraft lived at the back of this boarding-house and shared a courtyard garden and cats with it. His aunt ate either her main or midday meals here, and it seems that Lovecraft accompanied his aunt to festive meals here if he wasn’t in New York with the Long family. He may also have taken some meals here in the depths of winter. This was also the home of two of his late correspondents including Marion F. Bonner (for the letters see Lovecraft Annual 2015).

It’s also possible that Lovecraft would telephone from this building — there are two 1934 memoirs of Lovecraft in Lovecraft Remembered. In one, Kenneth Sterling discovers Lovecraft has no phone at home, in the other Dorothy C. Walter is telephoned twice by Lovecraft. Both are recalling 1934 at 66 College Street. In the Dorothy C. Walter instance Lovecraft was certainly at home, and would not have gone more than a few yards out of his door due to the bitter cold and ice outside. This suggests he may have made outgoing phone calls at the Arsdale, just across the garden court from 66 — unless perhaps the downstairs tenant at 66 had a phone that could be used. At the old address of 10 Barnes he had used his landlady’s phone for calls.

Update: my thanks to David Schultz for pointing out that the C.A. Smith letters indicate that Lovecraft’s aunt had a phone in her section/apartment of 66 College St.

Here we seen a long view from the tall Industrial Trust building. It’s late January 1929 and we can just make out the back of the Paxton/Arsdale. One can just about make out the garden space between Lovecraft’s house and the boarding-house.