A Metropolis of Leisure

While walking along a stretch of Arch Street in Center City Philadelphia during a visit to that city earlier this past summer, I noticed the letters “YMCA” engraved into the molding of the facade of a neoclassical building. I stopped and studied the structure, now a four-star hotel. A little over one hundred years ago, in November 1924, the horror author Howard Phillips Lovecraft lodged at this then YMCA and utilized it as his headquarters for a “tour of the Colonial past.”

Lovecraft shared his first trip to Philadelphia in March 1924 with his new bride, Sonia H. Greene, for their honeymoon. Several months later, Lovecraft returned to the City of Brotherly Love. Alone. After a series of physical and mental health challenges, Greene was recovering at a rest home in rural New Jersey. The absence of his wife seemed to provide Lovecraft with his own respite after several difficult months in Brooklyn. My most recent book, Midnight Rambles: H. P. Lovecraft in Gotham, contains a complete account of this episode.

Staring at the entrance of the former YMCA, I imagined Lovecraft bounding down the steps and beginning his “nocturnal tour” of Philadelphia’s miraculously preserved streets and neighborhoods dating from the colonial period so beloved by the writer. For a few autumn days, the city of Benjamin Franklin allowed this talented, yet troubled man to “take leave of the modern world.”