To know Lovecraft turns out to be a way to know a great deal about the city [of Providence].
Still weird, and mostly architecturally unchanged since the early 1900s, Providence was H.P. Lovecraft’s stomping ground and muse. Noel Rubinton takes a literary walking tour of the horror/sci-fi master’s haunts for the New York Times, including the John Hay Library at “Miskatonic” University (aka Brown), where some of Lovecraft’s 80,000 letters are archived, and Swan Point Cemetery, where the writer’s gravestone is decorated with pennies because he died penniless, at forty-six.