New York City

New York City, located in New York state, is the largest city in the United States, and the center of its financial and publishing industries. H. P. Lovecraft lived there for a time after his marriage to Sonia Greene, and set some of his Cthulhu Mythos fiction there. Later writers have continued to use it as a Mythos setting.
==Lovecraft in NYC==
Lovecraft first visited New York City in April 1922, invited by his future wife to stay with her for six days in her apartment at 259 Parkside Avenue in Brooklyn's Flatbush neighbourhood.An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, "Travels, Lovecraft's". He described his first impression of the city to his correspondent Maurice Moe:
I saw for the first times the Cyclopean outlines of New-York. It was a mystical sight in the gold sun of late afternoon; a dream-thing of faint grey, outlined against a sky of faint grey smoke. City and sky were so alike that one could hardly be sure that there was a city – that the fancied towers and pinnacles were not the merest illusions.H.P. Lovecraft to Maurice Moe, May 18, 1922 in H.P. Lovecraft, Letters from New York, ed. S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (San Francisco: Night Shade Book, 2005), 2.; quoted in The Gotham Center for New York History, "Marriage, Failure, And Exile: H.P. Lovecraft In New York", by David J. Goodwin, May 11, 2021.
He returned to the city to July 1922 and again in August of that year; during the latter visit, a tour of the Dutch Reformed Church in Brooklyn, with his friend Rheinhart Kleiner, inspired Lovecraft's story "The Hound". 
Lovecraft moved to New York on March 2, 1924, marrying Greene the next day at St. Paul's Chapel in Manhattan, the oldest church building in New York City. Lovecraft and Greene moved in 1924 to 259 Parkside Avenue in Brooklyn's Flatbush neighborhood. After Greene relocated to Cincinnati for work, Lovecraft moved to 169 Clinton Street in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. He described his Clinton Street home in horror terms:I conceived the idea that the great brownstone house was a malignly sentient thing — a dead, vampire creature which sucked something out of those within it and implanted in them the seeds of some horrible and immaterial psychic growth.The Bowery Boys, "H. P. Lovecraft’s very bizarre hatred of Red Hook and Brooklyn Heights", August 20, 2015. Lovecraft disliked New York's "crude, foreign hostility and underbreeding", its "vulgar trade spirit and plebian hustle.” He called the city “an Asiatic hell’s huddle of the world’s cowed, broken, inartistic, and unfit.” He moved out of Brooklyn and back to Providence in 1926.
==In Lovecraft's Fiction==
Lovecraft wrote three stories set in New York during his time there: "The Horror at Red Hook", written on August 1-2, 1925, is one of his most virulently xenophobic tales, reserving its choicest bile for the titular neighborhood on the Brooklyn waterfront:Red Hook is a maze of hybrid squalor near the ancient waterfront opposite Governor’s Island, with dirty highways climbing the hill from the wharves to that higher ground where the decayed lengths of Clinton and Court Streets lead off toward the Borough Hall.... The population is a hopeless tangle and enigma; Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and negro elements impinging upon one another, and fragments of Scandinavian and American belts lying not far distant. It is a babel of sound and filth, and sends out strange cries to answer the lapping of oily waves at its grimy piers and the monstrous organ litanies of the harbour whistles....
From this tangle of material and spiritual putrescence the blasphemies of an hundred dialects assail the sky. Hordes of prowlers reel shouting and singing along the lanes and thoroughfares, occasional furtive hands suddenly extinguish lights and pull down curtains, and swarthy, sin-pitted faces disappear from windows when visitors pick their way through. "He", written less than two weeks later on August 11, expresses directly his frustration with his New York move:My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration in the teeming labyrinths of ancient streets that twist endlessly from forgotten courts and squares and waterfronts to courts and squares and waterfronts equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean modern towers and pinnacles that rise blackly Babylonian under waning moons, I had found instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyse, and annihilate me."Cool Air". written in March 1926, is set in a 14th Street brownstone, based on 317 West 14th Street, in real life the home of Lovecraft's friend George Kirk. In the story, the narrator says that the boarding house "disgusted me much less than the others I had sampled."
==Lovecraft Circle==
Other early contributors to the Cthulhu Mythos made reference to New York City in their stories.
According to Robert E. Howard ("The Black Stone", "The Thing on the Roof"), New York was the home of the Golden Goblin Press, which put out a "carefully expurgated" edition of Nameless Cults in 1909. Howard's fragmentary story "The House" indicates that Justin Geoffrey's ancestors settled in New York in 1690.
Frank Belknap Long set his novel The Horror from the Hills at the fictional Manhattan Museum of Fine Arts. Halpin Chalmers, who in that novel is said to have been curator of archaeology at the museum, is called a former resident of Brooklyn in "The Hounds of Tindalos".
Ken, the narrator of August Derleth's "Innsmouth Clay", lives in New York.
==External Links==
*"H. P. Lovecraft’s Very Bizarre Hatred of Red Hook and Brooklyn Heights" at The Bowery Boys
*"Marriage, Failure, And Exile: H.P. Lovecraft In New York" at The Gotham Center for New York City History
==References==
Category:Structures
Category:Locations Incorporated From the Real World