This week on ‘Picture Postals from Lovecraft’, more from Boston. H.P. Lovecraft once recalled the time when he was a lad who was becoming interested in the wider world…

As soon as possible I procured an illustrated edition of Bulfinch’s Age of Fable, and gave all my time to the reading of the text, in which the true spirit of Hellenism [the Ancient Greek world] is delightfully preserved, and to the contemplation of the pictures, splendid designs, and half-tones of the standard classical statues and paintings of classical subjects. Before long I was fairly familiar with the principal Grecian myths, and had become a constant visitor at the classical art museums of Providence and Boston. I commenced a collection of small plaster casts of the Greek sculptural masterpieces, and learned the Greek alphabet and the rudiments of the Latin language.

The ‘old’ Boston Museum.

For Boston this meant the Museum of Fine Arts building on Copley Square, demolished in 1909. It was most likely best known by him in his middle-childhood circa 1898-1902 (age 8-12).

Some of the interior photographs currently available make the displays look extraordinarily dull, especially the painting galleries. What then was the attraction for the lad? Well, we know from the above memoir that the young Lovecraft once had an intense passion for classical sculpture and he was often seen haunting the sculpture hall in his own city. His city’s Museum had an entrance hall and exhibit of Greek sculptures, something I’ve posted about here before. As a boy he was fervent to see this when it opened as…

a recently opened exhibit of Greek antiquities at the Rhode Island School of Design

… and thus he pestered his family until he was taken there in 1897.

Therefore the next logical step for the family would be to take him to what is now known to archivists as the “old museum” in Boston, the pre-1909 Museum of Fine Arts.

before long I was fairly familiar with the principal Grecian myths and had become a constant visitor at the classical art museums of Providence and Boston

The attraction there would have been what was obviously a large and very fine collection of sculpture from Greece. He might have seen it from perhaps circa 1898 and onwards. On my assumption that the local 1897 visit in Providence came first, and then the trip(s) to Boston later.

Here then is a glimpse of what the young Lovecraft would have seen in the museum at Boston…

Entrance doors.

Main sculpture hall.

He must have been rapturous with all this, as he then had an “infatuation with the classical world” as S.T. Joshi puts it. This later fed into the setting though not the sentiment for his breakthrough poem “The City” (1919). Of which I have an annotated version from 2019.

This same Museum had several galleries of sculpture from Ancient Egypt.

Quite possibly Lovecraft also later encountered old favourites in the new post-1909 museum building at Boston, which opened in 1909 as the old one came tumbling down. However, on probable re-visits circa 1919, his sense of exhilaration would not have been the same. Evidently some of the Puritan darkness of New England had seeped into his views by 1918, as seen when he remarked in his essay The Literature of Rome…

The Hellenes [Greeks], with their strange beauty-worship and defective moral ideas, are to be admired and pitied at once, as luminous but remote phantoms.

More cheerfully, he would in later years have been looking out for the work of his own ancestor in the Museum…

Samuel Casey, Jun. — my great-great-great-granduncle — was a silversmith of such art and skill that pieces of his work are in both the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Metropolitan Museum of New York.

I have a counterfeiter as a great-great-grand-uncle about whom I’ll tell you some time. He was also a silversmith — with pieces surviving in the Metropolitan Museum of N. Y., the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, & elsewhere.

This week on ‘Picture Postals from Lovecraft’, more Boston pictures. Rectified, cleaned and toned.

Firstly another contender for the Boston subway which is depicted toward the end of the dreamlike prose-poem “Nyarlathotep” (1920), in which a column of people…

filed down a weed-choked subway entrance, howling with a laughter that was mad.

This is the subway inbound entrance that sat beside the Boston Public Library, seen here in 1915. Suitably gothic and Lovecraftian, more so than the one seen last week. Lovecraft almost certainly knew this Library entrance after 1919.

Then there’s his “Pickman’s Model” (1926), in which the artist depicts a scene in the Boston subway and names the station…

There was a study called ‘Subway Accident,’ in which a flock of the vile things were clambering up from some unknown catacomb through a crack in the floor of the Boylston Street subway and attacking a crowd of people on the platform.

Here is a picture of the subway station itself. It may have had two platforms, one for the subway…

And another where the Elevated train came down and in, to meet the subway at a wooden platform…

Elevated -to- subway platform.

So take your pick as to which one the “vile things” were emerging from and into. But the older wooden-slats one feels the more likely. Note the news-stand with magazines, albeit some 11 years before Lovecraft was (probably) sitting there and imagining ghouls emerging from the trackway.

Where They lurk…

Friday the 13th, oh no! What better day to dive down into… the Subways of Madness! Many will recall the passage in Lovecraft’s story “Pickman’s Model” (1926)…

There was a study called ‘Subway Accident,’ in which a flock of the vile things were clambering up from some unknown catacomb through a crack in the floor of the Boylston Street subway and attacking a crowd of people on the platform.

In May 1923 he described his own experience of “things dark and subterranean” in the Boston Subway, writing to Galpin in a letter…

[After a Boston Hub Club dinner I] hit the trail south [through the city]. Instead of rattling to the South Station on the elevated, I chose the subway, (I am exceedingly fond of all things dark and subterranean, and miss the rides up to 96th!) taking a train to Washington-Summer and there transferring to a S.S. train. [And thence to Providence].

Boston subway.

This shows that his usual Providence-to-Boston run, and back, would have taken him into Boston’s South Station, a main above-ground station for the city. An earlier letter confirms this was also the case in 1920…

“At Boston, I bade farewell to the Hubites, refusing overnight invitations & hastening to the South Station. I trod my native heath at 1:30 a.m. I reached home half an hour later”

South Station, Boston, with Elevated train and Elevated platform

This above-ground station also appears in “Pickman’s Model”…

We changed to the elevated [railway] at the South Station, and at about twelve o’clock had climbed down the steps at Battery Street and struck along the old waterfront past Constitution Wharf.

South Station Elevated platform, 1921.

News-stand window at South Station Elevated platform. Probably carried Weird Tales, in its day.

The “steps at Battery Street” elevated platform, Boston. These feature in “Pickman’s Model”.

“I didn’t keep track of the cross streets, and can’t tell you yet which it was we turned up, but I know it wasn’t Greenough Lane.” [to reach Pickman’s studio].

Greenough Lane, Boston.

So South Station itself, as well as the Elevated and the Boston Subway, is a setting. While the exterior of South Station is nothing spooky, the interior had a definite Lovecrafty flavour.

Later it appears in “At The Mountains of Madness” via the subway station in its lower depths. When the shoggoth-crazed Danforth recites the stations of Boston-Cambridge underground subway line to try to keep some sliver of sanity…

South Station Under–Washington Under–Park Street Under–

The tentacular tracks at ‘Park Street Under’.

The Boston subway (for there was no Providence subway, and HPL did not yet know New York City) also appears in the dreamlike prose-poem “Nyarlathotep” (1920), in which a column of people…

filed down a weed-choked subway entrance, howling with a laughter that was mad.

Entrance to South Street Under subway station, Boston.

Photo of 101-103 Clinton Street, New York City, 1908. Straw hats, ice-cream, cigars. Roadworks ongoing.

And a sketch of “Old Houses, Clinton Street”, New York City. Again looking very typical of parts of the street on which Lovecraft lived, when in the city, and also the shops around the corner. Although here the date is 20 years earlier in 1906. With thanks to the Met Museum.

Some 20 years later, the street had gone downhill when Lovecraft was at 169 Clinton St…

The sounds in the hall! The faces glimpsed on the stairs! The mice in the partitions! The fleeting touches of intangible horror from spheres and cycles outside time. … And what scraps of old papers with Arabic lettering did one find about the house! Sometimes, going out at sunset, I would vow to myself that gold minarets glistened against the flaming skyline where the church-towers were! … It was a queer enough setting, and one which no person of my acquaintance can yet parallel … The key­note of the whole setting — house, neighbourhood, and shop, was that of loathsome and insidious decay; masked just enough by the reliques of former splendour and beauty to add terror and mystery and the fascination of crawling motion to a deadness and dinginess otherwise static and prosaic. I conceived the idea that the great brownstone house was a malignly sentient thing — a dead, vampire creature which sucked something out of those within it and implanted in them the seeds of some horrible and immaterial psychic growth.” — Lovecraft to Dwyer, 26th March 1927.

This week on ‘Picture Postals from Lovecraft’, another hazy New York City skyline from the 1930s. In this case an early spring 1933 view from Hotel Bossert, by Samuel H. Gottscho. The original negative scan is at the Library of Congress. I’ve here flipped it so the view is correct, cleaned some gunge and colourised.

This is similar to the first view of New York City ‘lit up at evening’ which Lovecraft had from 110 Columbia Heights, near the Brooklyn Bridge. Hotel Bossert was just a short way south of that location. It shows more or less the same view as Lovecraft saw, albeit a little south, not lit up in the evening twilight, and a decade or so later (perhaps a new skyscraper or two).

On the views and relevant addresses see my earlier post on the view from Columbia Heights. I’m still hoping to find a similar ‘early evening + lights coming up’ view from the 1920s or 30s.

It was through a ‘Hell Gate’, appropriately enough, that H.P. Lovecraft entered New York City for the first time. The Hell Gate. In Letters to Family (p. 420), a September 1925 letter explains that…

[Queens Plaza] was the very first spot on Long Island that I ever saw; being at the portal of the great Hell Gate railway bridge, over which rolled my train on my initial metropolitan advent of April 1922.

Here are two pictures. One indicates and evokes the approach to this bridge, while the other looks down and off to the side of it.

The view has Hell Gate bridge on the far right, and the Queensboro Bridge on the left. The river is out of sight, down below both. Typically, Lovecraft tells his aunt that he recalls that in 1922 he had immediately noted from the train window “a huddle of nondescript wooden houses” down below, and filed them away for some future moment of antiquarian investigation. These later proved to be the “old time Astoria”. So his antiquarian interest in New York City had begun even before he stepped off the train in 1922.

The bridge is also known as Hells Bridge or Hell’s Bridge, Hell Gate Bridge, or the Hellbridge.

Lovecraft’s 1926 letter continues, describing a sight just seen on the same route…

I noticed en route [to Queens Plaza, across the Hell Gate in September 1926] a very attractive sight — the misty skyline of New York all grey and fairy-like as on the first occasion of my seeing it, three and a half years ago. The Queensboro Bridge loomed up deliciously in the middle-distance […] & the whole was glorified by slanting shafts of sunlight […] which dropt from an opening cloud to the vaporous regions of earth.

We actually have a fine mid-1930s National Archives public-domain picture of almost this very view… from the foot of the Hell Gate pilings, looking through the Queensboro Bridge at the grey towers of New York City in the distance beyond. I’ve here cleaned and toned it.

A side view of College St. Seen as part of a rare wide view of the Providence Athenaeum building, which offers an evocative side-glimpse of a spot half-way up the College Street Lovecraft knew so well. The perhaps c. 1900 card is here newly rectified, shadow-lifted and re-colourised.

Here we see the spot marked on the 1918 Plat Book map, with Lovecraft’s last home as the other highlighted spot.

A 1958 record-picture made on a glass plate shows much more detail, though is of course more than two decades after Lovecraft’s time and there’s been some overgrowth of the view. Still, one can see the John Hay Library behind the trees. Again, newly colorised.

Lovecraftian Mythos writers might wish to note the mysterious side-tunnel that this large image reveals…

The Athenaeum claims a connection with Poe dating to 1848, when he “is said” to have met many times with Mrs. Whitman in such alcoves and nooks as the library could provide. Lovecraft adds that Poe “wrote his name at the bottom of one of his unsigned poems in a magazine” there. Thus Lovecraft sometimes included it on his whistle-stop tour of Providence for visitors, though I’m uncertain if that would have involved entrance and browsing or just exterior architectural appreciation. I know of nothing to suggest Lovecraft ever had a subscription or ticket to this private library, though some in the circle of his aunts did (e.g. the lady who catalogued Lovecraft’s library at his death). He used the city’s main Public Library all his life, for free, and also had a stacks card there. Though, late in his life, a letter reveals that he went to The Athenaeum to consult some scarce books on the history of the defunct Nantucket whaling industry.

This week in ‘Picture Postals’, part of The Beth Murray collection of Providence photographs. My thanks to the Providence Public Library, which has large scans of the screened postcard version of these Providence postcards, postcards once issued as sets by the city’s Book Shop. I’ve selected the views and places more relevant to Lovecraft.

Benefit Street, Providence.

Thomas Street, Providence. Appears in “The Call of Cthulhu”.

The view from the garden of the Shakespeare’s Head.

“John Carter … His old shop & office, the Sign of Shakespeare’s Head, in Gaol-Lane” (Lovecraft, speaking of Providence)

The John Carter house on Benefit Street.

Along the River Seekonk, Providence. On the way to one of Lovecraft’s favourite places, the wooded bluff above York Pond. The spot is around the corner in the distance. The young Lovecraft used to row on this river, most likely hiring a boat from the boat-house rather than Red Bridge, and would land on the Twin Islands in the river’s stream.

George Street, Providence. City centre and the then-new Industrial Trust building in the distance.

Looking up College Hill toward’s Lovecraft’s last home. The olde left side swept away for new RSID buildings, though somewhat sympathetically done with an old courtyard archway retained.

The Handicraft Club half-way up College Hill. Lovecraft’s aunt lived here for a while.

Another view of the Handicraft Club half-way up College Hill.

One of the entrances to the covered shopping Arcade, Providence. A favourite childhood haunt of the young Lovecraft.

View across to the new State House.

Another State House view.

Street market in the Italian quarter, Federal Hill. Setting of the late story “The Haunter of the Dark”.

I haven’t tried to foist colourising on them, since most of them are too contrasty (which doesn’t take colour well). There are more pictures to be found at the Library’s website and even more if you root around and hang around on eBay. Usually noted there as a “Book Shop” card…

I’ve found that Murray (1913-?) also issued a 34-page photobook for Lovecraft’s favourite local day-tip location, This is Newport: A book of photographs (1948).

Therefore she was also photographing in the mid-late 1940s. Interestingly she also issued the presumably similar title This is Providence: Photographs (1947). These dates suggest the dates of her pictures may well be earlier than the circa 1960 dates of the Book Shop’s postcard-set. We may be looking at Providence circa the mid 1940s, less than a decade after Lovecraft died. This earlier date would explain the somewhat rough ‘immediate post-war’ feel re: the b&w quality of the prints. At that time she would have been limited in materials and camera, and was likely printing them up for cheap reproduction in her books rather than as big art-prints.

There is no trace of either of her books on Archive.org. It’s possible there may be better quality / more pictures in the books, and possibly even some biography. There appears to be no institutional archive with her negatives, from which better prints might now be made.