Lovecraft bemoaned that he, as an adult, could not ride a bicycle in Providence. It was not the done thing, for grown-ups. But Small State, Big History makes the remarkable point that in 1925 the city opened the grand Providence Cycledrome, 1925-1934…

bicycle racing was a major sport. … The Cycledrome, built in 1925, had bleacher seats that could accommodate 10,000 fans.

The site was perhaps a bit out-of-the-way for Lovecraft, though…

Located on the Providence-Pawtucket line off North Main Street

… and he was away in New York City when it was built and opened. Not that he would have visited for the races.

There may be a circumstantial link to such things though, since…

even earlier than the Cranston cycledrome was another stadium specifically built for bicycle racing constructed in Providence off Broad Street. Known as the Colosseum, it was built by local theatrical impresario [Colonel] Felix Wendelschaefer, who was also the manager of the Providence Opera House. Built in 1901, the Colosseum’s wooden grandstand was said to accommodate nearly 10,000 spectators.

It didn’t last long, as Small State, Big History states that the last races there were in “September of 1903”.

But the timing is right. I imagine that the 11-13 year old “veritable bicycle centaur” Lovecraft, and his gang of cycling boys, were only too aware of such a thing. Lovecraft had a number of connections with the Opera House in his youth and teenage years. Having the pre-Wendelschaefer manager as a family friend, and later calling the place a “second home”.

Once around the Bloch: an unauthorized autobiography of Lovecraft correspondent Robert Bloch, on Archive.org to borrow.

A couple of interesting points. In the earlier part of the 1920s, living in suburban Chicago…

Children’s books were not yet a major concern of the publishing industry: as a result of the cultural lag, libraries offered favorites of a previous generation. Tom Swift was still inventing, and G.A. Henry’s heroes were busily saving a vanishing British Empire. My father would introduce me to the dime-novel demi-gods of his own boyhood, buying reprints which detailed the exploits of Buffalo Bill, Nick Carter and Frank Merriwell.

This would seem to somewhat contradict Whitehead’s statement that many American boys were no longer aware of the Sherlock Holmes stories, although admittedly Holmes had by then gone off the boil and is not mentioned by Bloch. Lovecraft’s friend and fellow-writer Whitehead, a close observer of American boy-culture in evening clubs and summer-camps, had remarked in a 1922 essay on the…

fact that there is just now growing up a generation of readers for whom the Doyle of ‘Sherlock Holmes’ is an obsolescent figure.

But perhaps there were regional and urban/rural differences in consumption at that time, and urban Chicago was not the same as semi-rural Florida in term of boyhood reading tastes or availability. Possible also a difference between summer-camp boys and those who had to work through the summer.

The teen Bloch later visited the Weird Tales offices. On editor Farnsworth Wright and his business manager at Weird Tales…

Both men had a rare sense of humor, which is probably why they tolerated a teenage interloper like myself.

We don’t tend to think of Wright as having “a rare sense of humor”, but apparently he did in person.