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.