Famed horror fiction writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft, usually associated with Providence, Rhode Island, lived in two residences in Brooklyn from 1924-1926. His first was in an apartment (I don’t know which) with wife Sonia Greene at 259 Parkside Avenue, shown here, just east of Flatbush Avenue. Lovecraft was unable to amass much income other than what he sold to the pulps and from ghost writing, and Sonia, a milliner (she sold women’s hats) left to build a business in the Midwest.
Lovecraft moved to 169 Clinton Street in Brooklyn Heights, now upscale but then a slum. Depressed by life in New York, he moved back to Providence in 1926, and initiated (amicable) divorce proceedings with Sonia, who later learned to her dismay after she remarried that the divorce had never been finalized before HP’s death in 1937.
4 comments
Ia! Ia! Forgotten NY, fthagn!
Lovecraft is one of the best horror writers to have existed. Thanks for covering this!
Interesting you should call it upscale, for when I visited in 1991 the place definitely looked a bit dilapidated – buildings and walls sprayed with graffiti and the inhabitants predominantly black (this is not meant as a disparaging comment).
Lovecraft went through bouts of extreme unhappiness there. He was intimidated by the ‘foreign’ population, the mice-infested appartment was burglarized, and he was generally so incapacitated by what he felt were depressing surroundings that he couldn’t do as much as cha
change a light bulb!
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