Although living on a shoe-string budget, Lovecraft took full advantage of New York's cultural riches, namely its libraries and museums. He recalled that he "felt Rome" upon entering the Met. All his life, he listed the Metropolitan Museum of Art as one of his favorite cultural institutions.

Lovecraft was an inveterate walker partial to nighttime strolls. During an evening excursion in Brooklyn, Lovecraft and two friends, Samuel Loveman and Rheinhart Kleiner "found an abandoned garden and broken flight of steps" on Montague Terrace. This image might be the garden discovered by the literary trio.

Lovecraft first visited the Poe Cottage with his fellow writers and friends, James F. Morton and Frank Belknap Long, in April 1922. He believed that he had "entered a world of magic ... Such was the home of the man to whom I possibly owe every genuine artistic impulse ... " A photograph exists of the three friends standing before the former home of Edgar Allan Poe, documenting their shared pilgrimage.

Lovecraft visited and lived in New York during the fertile modernist movement of the 1920s. Although fully aware of contempoary artistic and literary trends, Lovecraft expressed little affinity with the avant-garde of Greenwich Village. Still, he walked beneath the Washington Square Arch "with the pride of patrician triumphator."

H. P. Lovecraft paid a nighttime visit to the Church's cemetery in September 1922 with his friend, Rheinhart Kleiner. The setting mystified Lovecraft: " ... the city seemed to fade from sight, & give place to the Netherland town of long ago." Before leaving, Lovecraft chipped out a piece from 1747 gravestone.

Lovecraft visited the Bronx Zoo with Frank Belknap Long in September 1922. Throughout his adult life, Lovecraft espoused xenophobic and racist beliefs--even extreme for 1920s and 1930s America. Age, experience, and exposure did little to temper this ugly aspect of Lovecraft's personality. Lovecraft compared the Zoo's Black patrons to apes in a letter to his aunt.

H. P. Lovecraft joined Sonia H. Greene for a performance of The Serpent's Tooth at the Little Theatre in September 1922. Leslie Howard, later famous for his role in Gone with the Wind starred in the play. Lovecraft and Greene were avid film- and theater-goers together in New York.

Lovecraft loved visiting historic buildings and sites, especially those dating from the 18th century. He spent an autumn afternoon at the Morris-Jumel Mansion. Lovecraft described it as "enchanting ... & commanding an expansive view of what was in its day a magnificent panorama ... once it consisted of blue waters, green fields & forests ... a pastoral scene of ineffable beauty."

Lovecraft and Sonia H. Greene were wed at St. Paul's on March 3, 1924. Although an avowed atheist, Lovecraft desired a church wedding to connect Greene's and his marriage to history and tradition. "Outside, the ancient burying ground and graceful Wren steeple; within, the glittering cross and traditional vestments of the priest ..."

Writer H. P. Lovecraft began boarding at this address on December 31, 1924. He came to loathe New York City, referring to the city as "the pest zone." He lived at 169 Clinton Street until returning to his hometown of Providence, Rhode Island in April 1926.