Story
Autumn in New York with H. P. Lovecraft
A connoisseur of horror literature and an unabashed lover of felines, writer H. P. Lovecraft was also a tireless walker, a flaneur captivated by buildings and places. When first visiting New York City in 1922 and later living there between 1924 and 1926, he explored all its five boroughs—Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx—in his never-ending quest for eighteenth-century architecture and historic sites. His letters to family and friends chronicle these adventures and capture a now vanished New York.
David J. Goodwin is an author, historian, and public speaker. His new book Midnight Rambles: H. P. Lovecraft in Gotham will hit shelves on November 7, 2023.
In September 1922, H. P. Lovecraft explored sections of the North Shore of Staten Island with his friend, the poet and New York native Rheinhart Kleiner. The “deserted” and “forgotten” cemetery of the Staten Island Dutch Reformed Church fascinated him. He observed that “moss” had “almost obscured the inscriptions on most of the gravestones.”
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During his extended stay in New York in the late summer and early autumn of 1922, Lovecraft grew increasingly comfortable with the city’s streetscape and mass transit. That October, he visited “the ancient stone” Van Cortlandt House Museum. While lingering in its “stately rooms,” he imaginatively stepped into the past world of New York’s Dutch gentry.
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Lovecraft’s letters to his family in Providence offer a meticulous, almost day-to-day account of his escapades and turmoils in New York City. Likewise, these letters document many now vanished buildings and spaces. While rambling through Manhattan during the small hours of the night with bookseller George Kirk, Lovecraft passed by “the pitifully decrepit house” where former President James Monroe took his final breath.
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Lovecraft unflaggingly searched New York for remainders of its colonial past throughout his years in the city. “\[T]he former fishing village of Canarsie” disappointed him. He noted only “a few scattered” and “nondescript wooden houses” and “a shabby-looking amusement park” near Jamaica Bay. This was the now long-gone Golden City Amusement Park.
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Following “vague rumours,” Lovecraft ventured deep into eastern Queens. There, he was “rewarded by one of the major discoveries of all \[his] New-York experiences”--the King Manor Museum. Finding the site closed, he returned on the following day and “stept within to a realm of golden memories” and “quiet, beautiful old traditions which quite banished New-York from the field of consciousness.”
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