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Amusements, Movies, and the Great Outdoors: Summertime Fun with H. P. Lovecraft
Iconic horror writer H. P. Lovecraft moved to New York City in 1924, marrying fashion industry professional Sonia H. Greene and chasing after the writer’s life. Things did not go as planned.
By the summer of 1925, Lovecraft was residing at a boarding house at 169 Clinton Street in Brooklyn Heights. He was growing disenchanted with New York. His wife was living on-and-off with him and looking for work. He found the modern rush of the city and its diverse population unsettling. He had trouble writing. Still, Lovecraft managed to enjoy the summer.
Just like today, New York City was an expensive and demanding place in 1925. Nonetheless, the city’s public treasures – its libraries, beaches, and parks – offered ready and affordable summertime leisure even for a writer chronically short of funds.
David J. Goodwin is writing a biography on H. P. Lovecraft and his years in New York City. He is the author of Left Bank of the Hudson: Jersey City and the Artists of 111 1st Street
H. P. Lovecraft loved Prospect Park and he often retreated to this “leafy realm” to read, write, think, or simply forget the noise and crowds of New York City. During the summer of 1925, Lovecraft and his wife, Sonia H. Greene, enjoyed a favorite quiet spot in the park – the Vale of Cashmere. Lovecraft described it as “delectable” and “lovely.” The couple would sit together, flip through magazines, and eat picnic lunches presumably near the Vale's lily pool and fountains.
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On the beginning of a July 4th weekend, H. P. Lovecraft visited his friend, the journeyman writer Arthur Leeds, at his office near Columbus Circle. Leeds “insisted on dragging” Lovecraft to the Loew’s New York Theatre and Roof. Housed in the former Olympia Theater on the corner of Broadway and 45th Street, the Loew’s contained an open-air movie theater on its rooftop. A frequent movie-goer during his time in New York City, Lovecraft critiqued the evening’s film as a “dull cinema show” and he admitted to “drowsing” throughout the “stereotypical drama.” This movie was possibly Steele of the Royal Mounted (1925).
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Like many New Yorkers, Lovecraft and his wife, Sonia H. Greene, looked to the Coney Island beach and boardwalk to beat the summer heat. Lovecraft first sampled “a new invention called cotton candy” at Coney Island, and Greene sat for a silhouette drawing there. The couple patronized the sideshows and attractions along the boardwalk. While walking through a funhouse at Luna Park in late July 1925, Lovecraft “saw the trick” behind a room defying “all principles of gravity.” Proud of her husband, Greene “could not resist” bragging to the ticket-taker that Lovecraft “had solved this ingenious riddle.”
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On a Sunday afternoon in July 1925, H. P. Lovecraft traveled to Pelham Bay Park in the northern reaches of the Bronx to explore Hunter Island with a group of literary acquaintances and friends. Lovecraft found the island’s “rocky coast very palely suggestive” of seaside villages in his native New England. The group enjoyed a full afternoon of “rock-climbing, lunch-eating, snap-shotting, mineral-studying, coast-exploring, & book-reading.” Lovecraft was overjoyed to discover “a fine old Colonial stone mansion” and witness a family of cats hunting mice on Hunter Island. It remains uncertain if he explored the former home of the Hunter family.
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Unable to write, H. P. Lovecraft left his desk for an all-night ramble through his favorite Manhattan neighborhoods to find “curious houses” and “imagination-kindling streets” on August 10, 1925. By the early morning hours on the following day, his “free & antique voyage” left him invigorated and “exactly in the humor for writing.” Looking toward “the clean, salt harbor” and the Staten Island ferry, Lovecraft decided to continue his voyage. Sitting on the ferry and “riding the billows under a dawn-paling sky,” Lovecraft headed toward his ultimate destination – Elizabeth, New Jersey, an industrial city across the Arthur Kill from Staten Island. Later that same day, now August 11, 1925, he would sit in an Elizabeth park and draft his new short story, “He,” a semi-autobiographical tale of a man wandering through a nighttime Greenwich Village and discovering a dark history.
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A lifelong patron and lover of public libraries (no reader can own every desired book), H. P. Lovecraft visited his neighborhood branch of the Brooklyn Public Library to sign up for a library card on August 20, 1925 -- his thirty-fifth birthday. Although he had lived in Brooklyn since March 1924, he had yet to join the borough’s library system. Lovecraft would rely on both the Brooklyn Public Library and the New York Public Library for his own research and pleasure reading. In fact, visiting the Montague Branch to consult a Latin dictionary would be one of Lovecraft’s final activities in the city before he returned to his native Providence in April 1926.
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