210 Doyle Avenue, at the corner of Doyle and Hope
The historic Ladd Observatory opened in 1891 under the direction of Prof. Winslow Upton. A regular program of transit observations and timekeeping was started in 1893. Prof. Charles Smiley, famous for his observations of solar eclipses, became director of Ladd Observatory in 1938.
The historic Ladd Observatory opened in 1891 under the direction of Prof. Winslow Upton. A regular program of transit observations and timekeeping was started in 1893. Prof. Charles Smiley, famous for his observations of solar eclipses, became director of Ladd Observatory in 1938.
Watch their "From Star to Clock... Timkeeping at Ladd Observatory" presentation to learn how they synchronized precision pendulum clocks to the stars.
“The late Prof. Upton of Brown, a friend of the family, gave me the freedom of the college observatory, and I came and went there at will on my bicycle. Ladd Observatory tops a considerable eminence about a mile from the house. I used to walk up Doyle Avenue hill with my wheel, but when returning would have a glorious coast down it. So constant were my observations, that my neck became affected by the strain of peering at a difficult angle. It gave me much pain, and resulted in a permanent curvature perceptible today to a close observer. My body has ever been unequal to the demands of an active career.” — H.P. Lovecraft in a letter to Rheinhart Kleiner, 16th November 1916
“The late Prof. Upton of Brown, a friend of the family, gave me the freedom of the college observatory, and I came and went there at will on my bicycle. Ladd Observatory tops a considerable eminence about a mile from the house. I used to walk up Doyle Avenue hill with my wheel, but when returning would have a glorious coast down it. So constant were my observations, that my neck became affected by the strain of peering at a difficult angle. It gave me much pain, and resulted in a permanent curvature perceptible today to a close observer. My body has ever been unequal to the demands of an active career.” — H.P. Lovecraft in a letter to Rheinhart Kleiner, 16th November 1916
Blackstone
(Not to be confused with "The Black Stone" - a short story written for the Cthulu Mythos by Lovecraft's friend Robert E. Howard)
In 1886 Horace Cleveland planned the layout of Blackstone Boulevard , and it was constructed in 1894 to provide better access to nearby Swan Point Cemetery.
Currently the woodland, ponds and open areas of the Conservation District face a considerable challenge from invasive plants.
These plants were originally brought to the region for gardens or came
in as accidental 'hitchhikers'. For various reasons they grow very well
here, and crowd out the native plants that local wildlife need for
food. They also invade yards and gardens, and are difficult to
eradicate.
"Here Nature unadorn’d displays a multiplicity of agreeable phases;
ravines, groves, brooklets, thickets, & Arcadian stretches of
river-bank — for the park borders on the wide & salty Seekonk. The
Seekonk is call’d a river, but in truth ’tis but a bay or inlet. The
river proper doth not begin till four miles to the north, where
(changing its name successively to the Pawtucket & the Blackstone)
its fresh streams flow over the mill dam at the Great Bridge of the city
of Pawtucket. How beauteous indeed is untainted Nature as beheld in so
idyllick a spot as Blackstone Park!"
"I think this park would explain
why such a born & bred town man shou’d possess such a taste for
rural musings & Arcadian themes!"
"When, at the age of 11, I was a member of the Blackstone Military Band,
(whose youthful members were all virtuosi on what was called the
‘zobo’–a brass horn with a membrane at one end, which would transform
humming int a delightfully brassy impressiveness!) my almost unique
ability to keep time was rewarded by my promotion to the past drummer."
“I was standing on the East Providence shore of the Seekonk River, about
three quarters of a mile south of the foot of Angell Street, at some
unearthly nocturnal hour. The tide was flowing out horribly — exposing
parts of the river-bed never before exposed to human sight. Many persons
lined the banks, looking at the receding waters & occasionally
glancing at the sky. Suddenly a blinding flare — reddish in hue —
appeared high in the southwestern sky; and something descended to
earth in a cloud of smoke, striking the Providence shore near the Red
Bridge — about an eighth of a mile south on Angell Street. The
watchers on the banks screamed in horror — “It has come — It has come at
last!” — and fled away into the deserted streets. [Blind panic
ensues] By this time the river-bed was fully exposed — only the deep
channel filled with water like a serpentine stream of death flowing
through a pestilential plain in Tartarus.” Lovecraft, summarizing a dream he had in 1920
34 Prospect St #26, Providence, RI 02904
XXX. Background
I never can be tied to raw, new things,
For I first saw the light in an old town,
Where from my window huddled roofs sloped down
To a quaint harbour rich with visionings.
Streets with carved doorways where the sunset beams
Flooded old fanlights and small window-panes,
And Georgian steeples topped with gilded vanes—
These were the sights that shaped my childhood dreams.
Such treasures, left from times of cautious leaven,
Cannot but loose the hold of flimsier wraiths
That flit with shifting ways and muddled faiths
Across the changeless walls of earth and heaven.
They cut the moment’s thongs and leave me free
To stand alone before eternity.
I never can be tied to raw, new things,
For I first saw the light in an old town,
Where from my window huddled roofs sloped down
To a quaint harbour rich with visionings.
Streets with carved doorways where the sunset beams
Flooded old fanlights and small window-panes,
And Georgian steeples topped with gilded vanes—
These were the sights that shaped my childhood dreams.
Such treasures, left from times of cautious leaven,
Cannot but loose the hold of flimsier wraiths
That flit with shifting ways and muddled faiths
Across the changeless walls of earth and heaven.
They cut the moment’s thongs and leave me free
To stand alone before eternity.
140 Prospect Street
This stately Federal-style brick mansion of College Hill was built in 1801 by Col. Thomas Lloyd Halsey (1751-1838), a prosperous
Providence shipping merchant and French consular agent in Rhode Island
during the Revolutionary War. The Halsey House figures as a setting in Lovecraft’s posthumously published short novel The Case of Charles Dexter
Ward, where young Charles Ward grows up, the child of a
prominent Rhode Island family who descends into madness and later
escapes from a private hospital for the insane.
"Charles Ward was an antiquarian from infancy, no doubt gaining his taste from the venerable town around him, and from the relics of the past which filled every corner of his parents’ old mansion in Prospect Street on the crest of the hill. With the years his devotion to ancient things increased; so that history, genealogy, and the study of colonial architecture, furniture, and craftsmanship at length crowded everything else from his sphere of interests. These tastes are important to remember in considering his madness; for although they do not form its absolute nucleus, they play a prominent part in its superficial form." - Lovecraft, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
65 College Street
Lovecraft's last residence from 1933 to 1937, the house was originally located at 66 College Street but was moved when an expanding Brown University overtook the
former location.
It was this house that he used as a
model for the home of his character Robert Blake, in his last-written story, “The
Haunter of the Dark”— a sequel to Robert Bloch's "The Shambler from the Stars".
"The square Georgian house had
a monitor roof, classic doorway with fan carving, small-paned windows, and all the other earmarks
of early nineteenth-century workmanship. Inside were six-paneled doors, wide floor-boards,
a curving colonial staircase, white Adam-period mantels, and a rear set of rooms three steps
below the general level.
Blake’s study, a large southwest chamber, overlooked the front garden on one side, while its west windows—before one of which he had his desk—faced off from the brow of the hill and commanded a splendid view of the lower town’s outspread roofs and of the mystical sunsets that flamed behind them. On the far horizon were the open countryside’s purple slopes. Against these, some two miles away, rose the spectral hump of Federal Hill, bristling with huddled roofs and steeples whose remote outlines wavered mysteriously, taking fantastic forms as the smoke of the city swirled up and enmeshed them." - Lovecraft, "The Haunter of the Dark"
Blake’s study, a large southwest chamber, overlooked the front garden on one side, while its west windows—before one of which he had his desk—faced off from the brow of the hill and commanded a splendid view of the lower town’s outspread roofs and of the mystical sunsets that flamed behind them. On the far horizon were the open countryside’s purple slopes. Against these, some two miles away, rose the spectral hump of Federal Hill, bristling with huddled roofs and steeples whose remote outlines wavered mysteriously, taking fantastic forms as the smoke of the city swirled up and enmeshed them." - Lovecraft, "The Haunter of the Dark"
The Athenaeum
Dan O'Bannon, Guillermo del Toro, and other "Friends of Lovecraft" paid a pretty penny to have this bronze bust put on display in the Providence Athenaeum.
10 Barnes Street
“As for the place—I have a fine large ground-floor room (a former
dining room with fireplace) and kitchenette alcove in a spacious brown
Victorian wooden house at the 1880 period—a house, curiously enough,
built by some friends of my own family, now long dead...”
"...in the ancient
city of Providence, where in the late forties Edgar Allan Poe used to sojourn often during his
unsuccessful wooing of the gifted poetess, Mrs. Whitman. Poe generally stopped at the Mansion
House in Benefit Street—the renamed Golden Ball Inn whose roof has sheltered Washington,
Jefferson, and Lafayette—and his favourite walk led northward along the same street to
Mrs. Whitman’s home and the neighbouring hillside churchyard of St. John’s, whose
hidden expanse of eighteenth-century gravestones had for him a peculiar fascination."
Cathedral of St. John
"About the hidden churchyard of St. John's - there must be some unsuspected vampiric horror burrowing down there and emitting vague miasmatic influences, since you are the third person to receive a definite creep of fear from it ... the others being Samuel Loveman and H. Warner Munn. I took Loveman there at midnight, and when we got separated among the tombs he couldn't be quite sure whether a faint luminosity bobbing above a distant nameless grave was my electric torch or a corpse-light of less describable origin."
The cornerstone for St. John's Church was laid in 1810 and the church was
dedicated in 1811. The building was renovated in 1855, 1866, 1906, and 1967, and
still retains its architectural integrity, but is in a state of
deterioration. It was listed on the Providence Preservation Society
10 Most Endangered Properties List in 2007, 2008 and 2010. Citing
dwindling membership and costs associated with upkeep, the diocese
closed the church in 2012.
This would’ve been the location of the marriage of Edgar Allan Poe and Sarah Helen Whitman, where they planned their union to take place and to be conducted by the minister Dr. Crocker.
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicéan barks of yore,
That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.
On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome.
Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche
How statue-like I see thee stand,
The agate lamp within thy hand!
Ah, Psyche, from the regions which
Are Holy-Land! - "To Helen" by E.A. Poe
Eternal brood the shadows on this ground,- "Where Once Poe Walked" by H.P. Loevcraft
Dreaming of centuries that have gone before;
Great elms rise solemnly by slab and mound,
Arched high above a hidden world of yore.
Round all the scene a light of memory plays,
And dead leaves whisper of departed days,
Longing for sights and sounds that are no more.
Lonely and sad, a specter glides along
Aisles where of old his living footsteps fell;
No common glance discerns him, though his song
Peals down through time with a mysterious spell.
Only the few who sorcery's secret know,
Espy amidst these tombs the shade of Poe.
The Cathedral of Saint John is UP TO SOMETHING
The Shunned House
135 Benefit Street
"The house was—and for that matter still is—of a kind to attract the attention of the curious. Originally a farm or semi-farm building, it followed the average New England colonial lines of the middle eighteenth century—the prosperous peaked-roof sort, with two stories and dormerless attic, and with the Georgian doorway and interior paneling dictated by the progress of taste at that time. It faced south, with one gable end buried to the lower windows in the eastward rising hill, and the other exposed to the foundations toward the street. Its construction, over a century and a half ago, had followed the grading and straightening of the road in that especial vicinity; for Benefit Street—at first called Back Street—was laid out as a lane winding amongst the graveyards of the first settlers, and straightened only when the removal of the bodies to the North Burial Ground made it decently possible to cut through the old family plots." - Lovecraft, "The Shunned House"
"The house was—and for that matter still is—of a kind to attract the attention of the curious. Originally a farm or semi-farm building, it followed the average New England colonial lines of the middle eighteenth century—the prosperous peaked-roof sort, with two stories and dormerless attic, and with the Georgian doorway and interior paneling dictated by the progress of taste at that time. It faced south, with one gable end buried to the lower windows in the eastward rising hill, and the other exposed to the foundations toward the street. Its construction, over a century and a half ago, had followed the grading and straightening of the road in that especial vicinity; for Benefit Street—at first called Back Street—was laid out as a lane winding amongst the graveyards of the first settlers, and straightened only when the removal of the bodies to the North Burial Ground made it decently possible to cut through the old family plots." - Lovecraft, "The Shunned House"
Standing before the house on Benefit Street, Drake could see, across
the town, the peak of Sentinel Hill and the old deserted church that had
harbored the Starry Wisdom Sect in the 1870s. He turned back to the
door and raised the old Georgian knocker (remembering: Lillibridge the
reporter and Blake the painter had both died investigating that sect),
then rapped smartly three times.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft, pale, gaunt, cadaverous, opened the door. "Mr. Drake?" he asked genially.
"It was good of you to see me," Drake said.
"Nonsense," Lovecraft replied, ushering him into the Colonial hallway. "Any admirer of my poor tales is always welcome here. They are so few that I could have them all here on a single day without straining my aunt's dinner budget."
He may be one of the most important men alive, Drake thought, and he doesn't really suspect.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft, pale, gaunt, cadaverous, opened the door. "Mr. Drake?" he asked genially.
"It was good of you to see me," Drake said.
"Nonsense," Lovecraft replied, ushering him into the Colonial hallway. "Any admirer of my poor tales is always welcome here. They are so few that I could have them all here on a single day without straining my aunt's dinner budget."
He may be one of the most important men alive, Drake thought, and he doesn't really suspect.
- volume 2 of Illumantis! by Shea & Wilson
Galway Bay
My ancestral home in County Clare, or rather what is left of it. Donald Trump built a golf course over half of it.
