This week’s postcard is of the Art Club on Thomas Street, Providence.

Here we see the road-fronting section of the Club known as the “Brick Club House” building. The publication date is 1914, but I would guess the date of the picture is perhaps a few years after purchase of this house by the Club in 1906. Due to it being brick-built my colorising of it has imagined the building unpainted, with perhaps blue windows and shutters. It had been altered “sufficiently” for the purposes of a 100+ strong Club, but it was only leased and it was apparently under threat of being swept away by a planned railroad tunnel. Thus it lacks the love and polish it was given in the mid 1920s and later. Yet even here we can see the new large front door with its “resounding knocker”. Some years later the building’s “countless wooden shutters”, also seen here, were removed and served to panel a new Reading Room set to one side of the Entrance. By circa 1909 the Club had a Library and subscribed to about 30 art journals.

Here we see the Club in the snow circa 1909, perhaps a year or two after the above picture. Two sets of shutters have already been removed…

Inside, a floor had also been removed, thus forming the tall exhibition gallery that rose to the skylight…

In “the season”, there was an art show hung here every two weeks. Lovecraft once recalled that…

my eldest aunt is still more expert in this [artistic] direction, having had canvases hung in exhibition at the Providence Art Club

There were also evening ‘dinners’ for the men and ‘afternoons’ for the women, at which speakers were sometimes invited. Occasionally there were events to which members could invite guest non-members.

In 1919 the “Dodge” house, glimpsed on the far-left of the first picture, was purchased by the Club, and further money had been raised to provide an extensive exterior makeover. Part of the intended change was to sympathetically brick over the old cobbled lane of circa 1786, with a restored Georgian arch and walkway. This horse-way had led back to the old stables and coach house at the rear of the property.

This arch is marked on the map-plan as 1920, but it apparently took until 1924 to complete. Lovecraft might have seen the ‘new-look’ Club before he left for New York City, but equally he might have been delighted to return a few years later to find the Art Club looking distinctly more Georgian and restored. Indeed, the Club was one of the very first places he went when he returned home…

Then followed a resumption of real life as I had dropped it two years ago — the life of a settled American gentleman in his ancestral environment. We went out to an exhibition of paintings at the Art Club, (the colonial house in hilly Thomas Street, in front of which I snap-shotted Mortonius last fall — I mean the fall of ’23) (circular enclosed [presumably a flyer for the Art Club]) and had dinner downtown at Shepard’s (neo-) Colonial Restaurant. In the evening a cinema show at the good old Strand in Washington Street completed a memorable and well-rounded day.” (Selected Letters II).

Seen on the left of the first picture of the Art Club was the spot that Lovecraft sometimes met and conversed with the cat “Old Man”. The arch under which “Old Man” liked to sit is not itself a Georgian original, though was loving restored to that style by the Club President George Frederick Hall. The cobbled lane he arched and partly re-cobbled was of that age, as one can see from the above map-plan.

Here we see this arch and the cat “Old Man”, as finely drawn by Jason C. Eckhardt for The H. P. Lovecraft Cat Book (2019). Here is Lovecraft recalling “Old Man”…

He was a great fellow. He belonged to a market at the foot of Thomas Street — the hill street mentioned in [The Call of] “Cthulhu” as the abode of the young artist — & could usually (in later life) be found asleep on the sill of a low window almost touching the ground. Occasionally he would stroll up the hill as far as the Art Club, seating himself at the entrance [to the alleyway]. At night, when the electric lights made the street bright, the space within the archway would remain pitch-black. So that it looked like the mouth of an illimitable abyss, or the gateway of some nameless dimension. And there, as if stationed as a guardian of the unfathomed mysteries beyond, would crouch the sphinxlike, jet-black, yellow-eyed, & incredibly ancient form of Old Man. […] I came to regard him as an indispensable acquaintance, and would often go considerably out of my way to pass his habitual territory, on the chance that I might find him visible. Good Old Man! In fancy I pictured him as an hierophant of the mysteries behind the black archway, and wondered if he would ever invite me through it some midnight … Wondered, too, if I could ever could back to earth alive after accepting such an invitation.

Lovecraft likely recalled his own lost cat of the same colour, Trigger-ban, who had run away when Lovecraft had lost his childhood home. Had this missing cat lived on, my guess is he would have been more or less be of the same age as “Old Man”. Lovecraft also likely knew that the line of the underground railroad tunnel ran along the back of the Art Club, going under the hill to emerge near the Seekonk River. The Art Club had been in danger of being swept away when the line was being planned. But in the end, the line of the new tunnel was usefully nudged a little on the map, so it ran at the back of the property. To one who was aware of such tunnels it might, poetically and in dreams, have provided an additional dark route into mystery. After the death of “Old Man” Lovecraft continued to meet and go with him in dreams…

Lovecraft dreamed of him even more than before — he would “gaze with aged yellow eyes that spoke secrets older than Aegyptus or Atlantis.” (S.T. Joshi, I Am Providence, quoting Lovecraft).

This week I follow Lovecraft way out… across the Mississippi river. Dealing again with steamboats, this post is thus a follow-on to last week’s post on Lovecraft’s steamboat trips to Newport, RI. Yes, he actually once made it to the Mississippi, but he also encountered and was delighted by a rail journey along…

… the sinuous windings of the yellow Tennessee River. … After a couple of days in Chattanooga I rode across southern Tennessee to Memphis, where I saw the mighty Mississippi for the first time in my life. This ride involved some of the most magnificent sights of the whole trip — for most of it lay in or beside what is whimsically called the ‘Grand Canyon of the Tennessee River’ — the magnificent bluffs forming part of the Cumberland Mountain system [as they coil above] golden-tinted waters.

Once settled into the old quarter of New Orleans he crossed over “Old Father Mississippi” via the Algiers ferry…

for the first time treading soil west of the Mississippi….

Did he also see the big old river steamers? It’s quite possible, as it was summer 1932 and they were working on the river to be seen and photographed until at least 1936. As seen here in 1936…

He was also riding south on steam trains. In summer 1932 Lovecraft was still living in the last few years of the great age of steam power. At home in Providence, he would the next year move into a new home heated by steam.

His visit to Lookout Mountain, also while in Tennessee, had however been via a nippy electrified mountain rail-car…

This precipitous car hauled him aloft Lookout Mountain and then he descended via a deep elevator shaft to explore another large and spectacular cave system. His first such descent having been in summer 1928 at the Endless Caverns.

I went up Lookout Mountain and revelled in the view and afterward descended into the spectral caverns inside the mountain — where in a vast vaulted chamber a 145-foot waterfall thunders endlessly in eternal night. This chamber and waterfall were discovered only ten years ago — at the end of sealed galleries whose geological formations prove them never to have been entered by mankind before.

I went all over Lookout Mountain [Tennessee], & explored the magnificent network of limestone caverns inside it — culminating in the vast & new-discovered [1923] chamber called “Solomon’s Temple” where a 145-foot waterfall bursts forth from the side — near the roof — & dashes down to a pool whose outlet no man knows.

For sale, a Lovecraft postcard, a pictorial addendum to a letter, in which he mentions his river journey down the river at Silver Springs. It sounds like it was sent to Clark Ashton Smith.

“Later – June 9 [1934]. Young Ar E’ch-Bei has held this epistle up several days, wishing to [solicit?] one enclosure. Meanwhile the envelope of your drawings has come, and he is in ecstasies over them. He keeps them always within reach and takes them out to gaze at every few minutes — and has made copies of many of them as best he can. I hope you can fix him up regarding the mythological matters. He wants all the available data on Tsathoggua — have you still the bits from ‘The Mound’ that I sent you when casting up that tale in 1930?

I went yesterday to Silver Springs, where the bottom of a lake is riddled with picturesque views seen from a glass-bottomed boat. Also sailed 10 miles down a tropical river which looked very much like the Amazon or Congo. The scenes for the cinema of ‘Tarzan’ were made here. I must send you a folder of the place — one of the most distinctive and fascinating spots I have ever seen. Evr Yrs for the Eternal Infra-red Flame.”

My June 2020 Picture Postals: On Silver River considered the same trip, with pictures.

This week, another look at an aspect of the Providence dockside. H.P. Lovecraft wrote…

All my spare cash goes into trips to ancient towns like Newport” … In Rhode Island there is only one city really American, and that is Newport”.

How did he get there? He travelled by sea, and this was his departure point…

The “Newport boat” landing and departure point, Providence.

This picture shows a setting briefly evoked in one of the world’s most famous horror stories…

“Locally, interest was intensified by the obscurity of the cause of death. The professor had been stricken whilst returning from the Newport boat [while he was walking up] a short cut from the waterfront…” (“The Call of Cthulhu”)

Lovecraft himself often “took a boat trip to Newport” from Providence, at the very time he was writing “Cthulhu”. The voyage would have been a day-trip, and thus he would have been at the Providence dockside early. For instance he was writing a letter before dawn in August 1926, and in it he wrote…

Well — it’ll be dawn soon, so that I can tell whether or not I’m going to Newport.

As the Great Depression deepened, he was sometimes able to afford more Newport trips each summer. At one point, what was usually 50 cents in high season became just 15 cents. In August 1932 he remarked on the voyage itself and its duration…

For the past three days I have been taking advantage of the incredibly low steamboat rates (15 cents round trip), and making diurnal [daily] voyages to ancient Newport. It is an admirable relaxation — a two-hour sail past green shores…

Though he regretted that he could not write his letters on the steamship, because…

the vibration will play the devil with my penmanship.

The throbbing steamship that Lovecraft endured was the Sagamore, a “remodelled” Bristol liner that now sometimes served as a local freight and cattle-boat, rather than the more salubrious liner which also plied the same route.

This would be the dawn sight of the Newport dockside, as Lovecraft approached from the sea…

And here is the same dockside seen in the distance, beyond some rather more picturesque fishing jetties…

After bringing in the Providence crowd, the steamship would then cast off for Block Island, returning later to pick up at Newport and return to Providence.

Once ashore in Newport, Lovecraft “wander’d through the living past” of the old town or “hiked into the Bishop Berkeley [British philosopher] country … some four miles beyond Newport beach on the road to Middletown”, through green fields of “sportive lambkins”. Often he sat writing for hours on “the great oceanward cliffs”, and once surveyed “the assembled U.S. Navy” in the bay — the place being also “quite a military town”.

Sometimes he ventured down into the holds of an ancient and venerable sailing ship that had been docked for the benefit of the Navy cadets.

Also, he haunted the oldest graveyards in his… “vain search in Newport for the grave of Michael, the elder James’s father [in his family-tree], who died in 1686”.

A lane in Newport, and Trinity church.

Lovecraft managed to see the town before the circa Fall/Winter 1927 “civic improvements” were made, which in a letter he called “detestable” because they would imperil…

the quaint narrowness of the main street, and the incomparable colour & atmosphere of the ancient wharves

He would also have known the Old Stone Tower, which appears to have had a small park around it where he might have sat and read.

This week, yet another aspect of College Street as Lovecraft and his aunts would have known it. At the corner of Benefit and College Streets stood the headquarters of the Handicraft Club.

The artistically grown trees were apparently magnolias, and these later grew up substantially and when in leaf they obscure several later photographs of the frontage.

The Club was established there in 1905, and a rigorous approach soon attracted a healthy membership of skilled crafts workers. The place was extensive and there was a showroom and an annual exhibition of new crafts work.

It was here that one of Lovecraft’s aunts lived in 1927…

… half-way up [College Street] my aunt boarded in 1927 at the Handicraft Club in the old Truman Beckwith house. You doubtless recall that brick edifice and its old-fashion’d terraced garden.” (letter to Morton, Selected Letters IV)

S.T. Joshi writes of this period in I Am Providence…

We do not know much of what Lovecraft was doing during the first few months of his return to Providence [from New York City]. In April, May, and June [1927] he reported seeing several parts of the city he had never seen before, at least once in the company of Annie Gamwell, who at this time was residing at the Truman Beckwith house at College and Benefit Streets.

We do however know just a little of why his aunt might have been there. In 1925 the House had been purchased to serve as a “permanent home” (Handicrafts Of New England, page 321) as well as a clubhouse, and we can probably assume this was why Annie Gamwell could live there — if only for perhaps a single summer season of board and lodging. It seems plausible to assume that Lovecraft took the opportunity of his aunt’s residency to thoroughly appreciate the fine architecture. The Library of Congress has a detailed plan-book of the entire house, evoking all the details of the craftsmanship that Lovecraft would have thus admired. Though a photograph perhaps better evokes the interior that his aunt would have enjoyed at that time…

Atheist though he was, a few years later the mellowing Lovecraft was able to amiably enjoy an old traditional custom. Christmas 1933 found him listening to carols sung in the Handicraft Club courtyard…

Fixed up the sitting-room hearth with greens and surprised my aunt — and borrowed a cat for the occasion. Heard carol-singing in the early evening in the quaint cobblestoned courtyard of the Georgian Beckwith mansion (where my aunt was in 1927) halfway down the antient hill.” (letter to Morton, Selected Letters IV)

a turkey dinner at the boarding-house across the back garden & a stroll half-way down the hill to hear the carol-singing at the old Truman Beckwith mansion. I took the midnight coach & arrived in Manhattan the next morning —” (letter to Toldridge, Selected Letters IV)

This Friday ‘Picture Postal’ follows last week’s, which had the same location but looked toward the city. In 1935 old buildings on lower College Street, Providence R.I, were demolished. Here we see 32-34 College Street in the process of demolition.

The wheels of modernity were spinning up and the motor car was the future. Horse-yards, and the antiquarians and artists who might haunt them, were increasingly surplus to requirements. We can imagine that Lovecraft, who lived further up the street at No. 66, objected to the demolitions. As he had at the demolition of the Old Brick Row, and other regretful changes to the city’s fabric. Though I can find no evidence that he did so for the bottom of College Street. Given the state of some of the backs (24-28 seen above), and the need for grand schemes in the Great Depression, it might have been difficult to publicly call for their preservation. Such is the way of it. Someone in authority makes a quiet decision somewhere and a street or area starts to be neglected. 15 or 20 years later the place is in such a state that it ‘has’ to be demolished, and it’s by then difficult to argue in favour of preservation.

Here we see local artist Stacey Tolman’s drawing of one of the yard entrances in the former ‘Rosemary Lane’, or one very much like it, and another from the other side showing the last days of usage for horses.

Here we see the back courtyard of No. 32 (top) and No. 33 (bottom), with the motor car replacing the horse in the yard at No. 33.

Tolman had earlier painted this yard at No. 33 in happier days, with its calm bright scene poised between industriousness and a faint threat.

Today, cynical modern eyes might instantly see men gambling and idle slum-boys playing hoop, or might raise a lip at the ‘chocolate-box’ sheen common to the Rhode Island art of the period. But the men are looking over plans for a worthy new horse-carriage for the somewhat Lovecraft-like man standing by them. Sturdy working apprentices stand ready to fit an iron rim to a hand-crafted wheel. An industrious wife has hung out lines of washing and one can just see her fresh green herb-pots on the same platform. This is a picture of a living place at work, but threatened by time. A point Tolman has emphasised by having the fateful clock tower of the Courthouse peering over the rooftops, steadily striking out the hours.

Did Lovecraft know the courtyard? He comments on the matter in a letter of April 1925. His aunts had both sent him a sketch of the courtyard, presumably printed in the local paper. He was astounded that he had never actually seen this inner court… “in all the thousands of times I have passed up & down College Hill.” However, being thus aware of it, we can be fairly sure that he visited it at least once on his return to Providence.

The demolitions appear to have inspired Lovecraft’s ever-fertile imagination. Late in his life, in a bitter winter, he ventured out from No. 66 to visit with a local girl admirer. Her memoir later recalled…

“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.

It was, of course, a test to see how imaginative she really was. As Lovecraft wrote a few years later…

The bulk of the human race lives very little in the imaginative realm; hence can seldom grasp the goals, motives, & aspirations of anyone with whom subtle perspectives, symbolic associations, & obscure mental correlations form important emotional factors.

The end result of the demolitions, looking up the lower part of College Hill…

More vintage pictures of Lovecraft’s College Street, more or less as Lovecraft would have seen it was he briskly walked down the hill from his home at No. 66 and approached the lower part of College Street. He possibly used the right-hand side as seen here, as the convention of the Hill was apparently that the left sidewalk was the one used by Brown students. Using the right sidewalk would also presumably avoid any possibility that one would be jostled by unsavoury nautical-looking types outside the Courthouse. The Court buildings are seen on the left of the picture. Even if he habitually chose to turn left or right here, on his way to the commercial district, he would still have seen the view depicted.

Note the slightly sinister well-like manhole at the intersection, with a tight circle of bricks around it. How it might have glistened in the moonlight, and led to thoughts of what might lie beneath…

“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.

You can also just about see one of two courtyard entrances a little further down. This wasn’t the same “one of those old-fashioned courtyard archways (formerly common everywhere) for which Providence is so noted” on the slope of Thomas Street, which there led into the courtyard in which Lovecraft met the cat ‘Old Man’ at night. But I have photos of these College Street back-courtyards which evoke similar courtyard spaces. Of which more next week.

When Lovecraft was about level with one of the back-courtyard entrances he would be poetically poised between its antique allure on the one hand (if the doors were open), and on the other hand a forward view which now soared up into a towering modernity…

It appears that he actually didn’t mind this view too much, despite his yearning for the pre-modern. Long before he moved in to No. 66 he wrote about how he found himself walking up this particular street one evening when it was growing dark, which he had apparently never done before at that time of day. And it suddenly occurred to him to stop and turn and look back, since it would give a dusk view of Providence that he had never seen before. The Industrial Trust building (the tower seen here) was recently built by that time, and he found himself rather enchanted by the view he saw — differing grids and planes of distant lights rising up toward the stars.