In late December 1923 Lovecraft explored the India Wharf rail yards in Providence, ending up somewhere on the waterside between Fox Point and the rail bridge that crossed into East Providence.

We edged through ghastly channels between black silent freight cars on the India wharf at the southern tip of Providence’s east peninsula, a region I had never penetrated, though I had for twenty years or more wonder’d about it. It was an eldritch wiggle, like that of Alciphron in the tortuous crypts of Egypt, and at last we came out where pale phosphorescence effused from century’d rotting piles, and the distant harbour-lights bobb’d and twinkled away to the south, the far south, the south of dreams and templed isles, and curious ports, and pagodas of gold with savor of spice and incense around them. (Letters to Maurice W. Moe, page 510)

The context was that Morton was going home on the New York boat. In this case Lovecraft even tells us the name, the frigate Concord, seen here in Providence…

Both Morton and Loveman appear to have preferred to travel back from Providence this way. Though it appears to have taken Loveman a few tries to find the right passenger line and time of day to avoid the boorish crowd he had endured on his first such trip.

Lovecraft had first walked Morton up a long and insalubrious street that led to the New York docks, a street where as he put it…

where murther lurks in the alleys, and one stumbles over corpses in the gutters … a confused blur of pallid lamps and Hogarth vistas.

The latter must mean glimpses down alleys and entrances toward the riverside, as they walked up to Fox Point.

Once the luggage was stowed aboard, Morton found he had quite some time to wait until departure. Thus the pair appear to have slipped away down the adjacent freight lines. Presumably, over the Christmas break, the trains were backed up and not moving. There are two options for the exploration route. Either the pair threaded through the rail yards and a maze of freight trucks a relatively short way, to find the first good clear view over water to the south and the open sea. Or they walked the rails around to the industrial Wilkesbarre Pier and looked south from there, which seems far more unlikely.

Thus I’d say they were likely standing about here, in the chill and deepening dusk of 27th December 1923…

It’s interesting to think that an encounter with the black freight cars, arranged akin to “the tortuous crypts of Egypt”, could have informed the mood of his Houdini story “Under The Pyramids” in February 1924.

After seeing Morton off on the Concord, Lovecraft wrote that he walked back into town and took in a silent “cinema”. What might have been playing at that point in time? Salome and Lon Chaney’s While Paris Sleeps were both released at the start of 1923. There was no new Chaplin comedy feature in the second half of 1923, as Chaplin had made his first swerve into trying to be “serious” and it was a box-office disaster. The rest of the end-of-1923 fare seems very unappealing stuff. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (early September 1923) might still have been in cinemas, but Lovecraft had probably already seen it by then. Yet there was the German UFA silent feature The Street. This sinister cinema was released at the end of November 1923, and UFA was a big studio with USA distributors. Lovecraft had no German, but for a silent movie that wasn’t a problem. In The Street…

“The city is an expressionistic nightmare, a dangerous and chaotic place. The unfortunate man encounters thieves, prostitutes, and other predators. But the real threat [is that] The street itself is alive and watching.”

One can then imagine Lovecraft, as he fell asleep in the cinema as he often did, softly chuckling to himself… “Ha, I did it first!”

The Street, 1923.

I’ve found another view of Lovecraft’s lane and a bit of his home at No. 66. It’s tucked into the side of a 1906 bird’s eye view of the Brown Campus, possibly made from a balloon.

Tucked into the corner we just about get a glimpse of No. 66, set back from the road on its unpaved lane.

Here we see Lovecraft at the top of the steps leading up to his front door, these steps possibly appearing as a smudge on the postcard.

Judging by the eBay photo, the card was slightly clipped at both edges by the seller. So, since it was only a mere $5 with international postage… I bagged it. I’ll hope to have a bigger scanner-scan of that corner, in due course.

Providence, as if seen from a night-gaunt hovering above 66 College St. Available as an 8000px .TIF at the LOC.

This 1895 supplement the Providence Sunday newspaper at first appears to be a standard and rather dull city engraving of the period, until one zooms right in and sees the quality of the ink and wash work. Here we see a detail of the Providence river and dockside, the side usually shunned by postcard-makers…

In letters of the 1930s Lovecraft recalled the rigged sailing-ships of Providence, seen and admired in his youth but now departed.

In the heavy fog of late November 1923, his Providence friend Eddy introduced him to the sinister courtyards and back-alley labyrinths which ran back from the dockside seen above…

a squalid colonial labyrinth in which I moved as an utter stranger, each moment wondering whether I were indeed in my native town or in some leprous, distorted witch-Salem … there was a fog, & out of it & into it again mov’d dark monstrous diseas’d shapes … narrow exotick streets and alleys … grotesque lines of gambrel roofs with drunken eaves and idiotick tottering chimneys … streets, lines, rows; bent and broken, twisted and mysterious, wan and wither’d … claws of gargoyles obscurely beckoning to witch-sabbaths of cannibal horror in shadow’d alleys that are black at noon … and toward the southeast, a stark silhouette of hoary, unhallowed black chimneys and bleak ridgepoles against a mist that is white and blank and saline — the venerable, the immemorial sea”. (Lovecraft, heavily abridged from a letter to Morton, 5th December 1923).

Zooming further in we see a lone rower on the river…

As a sturdy lad, Lovecraft was for a short time an avid rower in a small boat, a period from which memories probably linger in the story “Dagon”. Lovecraft was (so far as we know) only boating around the corner on the Seekonk, rather than pulling past the sailing-ships and coalers as seen here. Still, the sight of a little rower is evocative of a freer time…

“I used to row considerably on the Seekonk … Often I would land on one or both of the Twin Islands — for islands (associated with remote secrets, pirate treasure, and all that) always fascinated me.” — Lovecraft letter to Rimel, April 1934.

Continuing the vague ‘zoo’ theme (we had zebras two weeks ago), this week’s ‘picture postal’ from Lovecraft is of an elephant.

Lovecraft would often jokingly refer to the size of his own nose in letters, and compare it to that of the resident pachyderm at Roger Williams Park in Providence…

Note the proboscidian effect,” [meaning his own large nose, in his photograph of him made by Robert Barlow …] “my only local rival in that field being the elephant at Roger Williams Park.

The choice of word faintly indicates the tentacular, and it was used again as such in the story “Out of the Aeons”, said of the nameless creature glimpsed through the mummy’s eye…

Even now I cannot begin to suggest it with any words at my command. I might call it gigantic — tentacled — proboscidian — octopus-eyed …

For most of the city’s children the elephant inspired amazement and curiosity rather than horror. They had clubbed together to raise the funds to obtain and keep him for the city. His name was “Baby Roger”, and he appears to have arrived at the park as a baby elephant when Lovecraft was aged three. We can plausibly imagine that the infant Lovecraft was taken to see him several times, and the elephant’s trunk may well have been his first real encounter with the ‘living tentacular’.

In December 1928 Lovecraft wrote to his schoolteacher friend and correspondent Moe…

   “I have come upon an altogether unsuspected country lane which winds up the ancient hill by the falls of the Moshafsuck … not a quarter of a mile from this very home [Barnes St.], yet which I never knew till this September. … line’d on one side by abandon’d gambrel-roof’d houses of the vintage of 1740 or 1750 … there is obtainable a glamourous view of Smith’s Hill — with the dome of the marble State House … which reminds one of the citadel of some fascinating Renaissance hill-town … it so overwhelm’d me with aestetick extasy when I first glimps’d it, that I was impelled to exclaim out loud, & whip forth my tatter’d note to make a crude sketch. … the [Providence] art club lately hous’d an exhibit which proves I am not alone in viewing Old Providence with an enraptur’d eye. The exhibit, of which I enclose a catalogue, was of drawings and etchings by one Henry J. Peck; and reveal’d the archaick liveliness of the ancient town [he] beholds the same cryptick overtones of brooding elder magick that I behold … huddles of ancient roofs, vistas of grass-grown colonial lanes & Georgian flights of railed steps, glimpses of tarry ghosts along the Indies-dreaming waterfront … the drawing reproduced in the catalogue is #30 of the exhibit — the antient inn-yard of the Franklin Tavern (circa 1770) on College Hill. … such arch’d yardways, when unlighted within, suggest the most spectral suggestions conceivable at night.”

Who was Peck, and where is this admired work now? Henry Jarvis Peck (1880-1964) was usually referred to by his contemporaries and editors as Henry J. Peck. He grew up and came of age in Warren, Rhode Island, attending the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). He studied first with Eric Pape in Boston, then George L. Noyes, then from age 21 for three years with Howard Pyle.

A writer as well as an illustrative artist for books and magazines, his combined articles appeared for several decades in the more upmarket magazines of America. In the summer he lived in Warren with a studio at Rodney Street, but as the snow settled he went to overwinter in New York City. Warren, you’ll recall, was a favoured haunt of H.P. Lovecraft and the scene of some remarkable ice-cream eating contests.

A favourite creative approach seems to have been to charmingly contrast the traditional and the modern, with a New England twist.

He appears to have been working in his prime from around 1906-1929. Some surviving sketch material suggests he may have served as a rapid-sketch war-artist with the Navy. Here we see officers on deck.

By the mid 1920s some of his work for Scouting journals was quite cartoonish. He also painted a string of folk-art-y radio-ham magazine covers, with the same easy and warm approach.

He also produced more refined work in this cartoonish line, for the American Country Life magazine, as seen here in December 1928. One wonders if this was a one-off swan-song, or if there was a whole series of this material.

The online record suggests that Providence saw his only gallery show, and all that now remains are pictures in private hands. Lovecraft spoke to the artist at the launch of the show, and urged him to publish a book of the Providence work. But it was not to be. All that appears to survive is a catalogue for Glimpses of Providence, with a single picture, which is noted in the Moe letters. This is elsewhere noted as…

a small catalogue for an exhibition of drawings, “Glimpses of Providence and Vicinity,” by Henry J. Peck

The new Industrial Trust Building of 1928, looming over the old rooftops.

Lovecraft sent copies of the catalogue to Moe and Wandrei, and possibly to other correspondents. A label on a picture-back suggests Peck may once have had a studio in Providence in the 1920s, on Benefit Street, possibly while seeking out scenes and making the drawings for the 1928 show. But it seems he did not encounter Lovecraft before the big pre-Christmas 1928 show, and no contact was made afterwards.

Where is Peck’s body of work now, as indicated by the catalogue? Work which might be so useful now to illustrate “Lovecraft’s old Providence” of the 1920s, beyond the main well-known buildings and sights? Mostly sold and dispersed, by the look of it. One hopes that the finer etchings at least are ‘safely lost’, quietly folded away for posterity in some neglected archive. But no such online record page seems to exist for such a holding, and a search of the RISD archives database also suggests nothing. But one such recently came up for the auction, going for a pitiful $30, and the auctioneers kindly left a large scan online.

“Down College Street” (1928). A familiar-seeming man climbs the hill with a book or bundle of letters.

Toward the end of his life Peck did produce a book, a history of his home town of Warren in the form of 200th Anniversary of Warren, Rhode Island. Historical Sketch and Program 1747-1947.