Lovecraft sent a postcard of “New Industrial Trust Building. Providence, R.I” to Wandrei in April 1928.
The Industrial Trust Building replaced the Butler Exchange and was Providence’s first ‘skyscraper’ at 428 ft. It was completed and opened in 1928, but we might imagine that its top-most “beacon” light was fitted and lit as soon as the top-most sections were in place — in order to warn aircraft and airships. This beacon, then red but today said to be green, became a night sighting-point for Lovecraft from around 1928 onwards, as is shown by a letter and his late story “The Haunter of the Dark”…
“Now and then he would train his field-glasses on that spectral, unreachable world beyond the curling smoke; picking out individual roofs and chimneys and steeples, and speculating upon the bizarre and curious mysteries they might house. Even with optical aid Federal Hill seemed somehow alien, half fabulous, and linked to the unreal, intangible marvels of Blake’s own tales and pictures. The feeling would persist long after the hill had faded into the violet, lamp-starred twilight, and the court-house floodlights and the red Industrial Trust beacon had blazed up to make the night grotesque.” — from “The Haunter of the Dark”.
This picture shows there were several beacon lights, which would have effectively merged into one from any distance away.
“[On] these evenings when I tread the narrow ancient streets on the brow of the hill and look westward over the outspread roofs and spires and domes of the lower town to where the distant hills of the countryside stand out against the fading sky, I do not scan that sky as a measurer or an analyst. Resplendent Venus and Jupiter shine close together, hanging over the great beacon-tower of the terraced Industrial Trust Building as they used to hang 2000 years ago over the towering Pharos in Alexandria’s crowded harbour; and as I watch them and compare them with the great red beacon and the mystic twinkling lights of the dusk-shadowed city below, I surely hold no thoughts of their objective nature and position [in astronomical terms] […] I merely watch and dream. I dream of the evenings when these orbs did indeed hang over cryptic and seething Alexandria — and over Carthage before it, and over Thebes and Memphis and Babylon and Ur of the Chaldees before that. I dream of the hidden messages they bring down the aeons from those distant and half-forgotten places, and from those darker, obscurer, places in the still older world, whereof only whispered rumour dares to speak.” — Lovecraft letter to Harris, February-March 1929. Probably to Woodburne Harris rather than to the British Harris.
“And [the evening scene is] even more magical now that we have tall buildings (12, 16, 26 stories) to light up and suggest enchanted cliff cities of Dunsanian mystery” — Lovecraft letter to Hoffmann Price, 1933.
“… the recent conjunction of Venus and the crescent moon. I saw it from my own west windows, and its natural impressiveness was enhanced by its setting. It was twilight, and the ancient roofs and boughs and towers and belfries of the hill were silhouetted blackly against a still-orange sky, The windows of the down-town office buildings, just beginning to light up, made the lower town look like a constellation — and the great red beacon atop the 26-story Industrial Trust Building (which dominates the town as the Pharos dominated Alexandria) was blazing portentously. In the southwest the lofty Georgian belfry of the new Court House loomed up darkly save for the lighted clock-face, the floodlights not having been turned on. And just south of this picturesque outline, high in the sky where the orange was turning to violet, floated Astarte’s bediamonded crescent with the blazing planet close to its upper horn! It certainly was a sight to gasp at — the black towers and roofs against an orange west, the twinkling turrets of the lower town, and the horned moon with its strangely luminous companion. Assuredly, I shall not soon forget it.” — Lovecraft letter to Clark Ashton Smith, November 1933.
