This was in the lobby of the Butler Exchange in Providence. Lovecraft rhetorically derided the “ugly nondescript” architecture of such “Victorian pests as Butler Exchange” in Providence, the Butler being a large commercial ‘offices to let’ building that had opened in 1873. It had six floors including a floor of shops, and seems to have been inhabited for some fifty years by a multitude of small upmarket trades that included music teachers, portrait painters, and milliners. Lovecraft had his way on the city architecture, for once, and the carbuncular building was demolished in 1925.

Here we see the Exchange’s ‘hole on the wall’ coffee vendor, said to be in the entrance Lobby and possibly tucked into a defunct elevator shaft. Judging by the ‘News Company’ sign above, it was perhaps servicing newsmen who were working through the night to ready the dawn news? The demolition of the Exchange was in 1925, thus the date of this picture is likely to be circa 1920-24.

I can find no evidence that Lovecraft patronised this particular place on his pre- New York night-walks, either alone or with Eddy. But, given its very central location and likely all-night hours and public pay-phone, this would have been of obvious interest to him. Especially after a chill all-night walk or on leaving the train station after a cold journey at a very late hour. Even if he never visited, the picture is still very evocative of small ‘hole on the wall’ coffee vendors in Providence, at night in the early 1920s.

The Exchange building also evidently had a large art show on at least one occasion, and one of these in particular may have been a daytime draw for Lovecraft-al-Hazred…

H. Cyrus Farnum [RSID, Providence Art Club] … painted brilliant outdoor scenes of Africa which were exhibited at the Butler Exchange in Providence. He died at home in 1925. — North Providence

Cyrus Farnum had a large studio in the Butler Exchange, and this was presumably the location of the exhibition. As a leading member of the Providence Art Club, Lovecraft’s aunts would almost certainly have attended his show, since they were fellow Club members. Given the subject matter from Algiers and Biskra in North Africa, one imagines that Lovecraft would have been keen to accompany them — if he was not by then in New York City. I hazard a guess at c. 1920-24 for the show, as a retirement retrospective, but it might even have been staged in the pre-war period. He had certainly been in Algiers in 1905, given the date on one such picture, and he was exhibiting his best Algiers pictures during the war. Without access to local newspaper archives, or a completist database of all known pre-1945 art exhibitions (is there such a thing?), a date can’t be pinned on this show at the Butler Exchange. It would certainly be interesting to know if it was a pre-Christmas 1920 show, as the show would then be a possible influence on Lovecraft’s “The Nameless City” (written January 1921).