Three creatures guard a doorway on 35th Street near Astoria Boulevard in Queens. Gargoyles and fanciful monsters of all shapes and sizes adorned not only architecture, but such varied objects as printers’ marks and the heads of walking sticks.
In Pickman’s Model, H.P. Lovecraft created a nightmare world under the cemeteries of Boston in which ghouls congregated under graveyards, taking sustenance from unnamable sources, and were the inspirations for such sculptures and carvings that exist in architecture.
But in reality they exist only in the feverish dreams of architects and designers until they became unfashionable during the Art Deco era, and the streamlined styles that followed it. Perhaps they will return some day; but a black plague may be necessary to revive them.
9/24/13
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H.P. Lovecraft was probably the second greatest practitioner of macabre literature after Poe, even though the genre is consistently ignored the by the NY Times type of critics (Read: useless parasytes who can’t write anything on their own.) If you want to read his best NYC stories, check out “He” and “The Horror At Red Hook”, written during the time he lived at 169 Clinton Street in what is now Brooklyn Heights, but in the 1920s was a near slum full of “hateful foreigners” as Lovecraft once put it. (But remember, he owned a cat that he named “Nigger Man”, so….) Just wanting to set the record straight about a great author who was, sadly, a man of his times.
I read an anthology of H.P.Lovecraft tales about thirty years ago. I’m still having nightmares!