Where Are Lovecraft's Providence Locations on a Map?

Providence, Rhode Island is the one city on file that gives a mapmaker very little trouble. Its localities carry the VERIFIED stamp, which means they can be placed with confidence, and several of them can be placed to a street address. The Field Survey pins them against the present-day city and notes where the building on record has since been replaced.

The localities, west to east

• The Free-Will Church, Federal Hill. The derelict church of The Haunter of the Dark, with its sealed steeple room. The Archive reconciles it with St John's Church on Atwells Avenue, demolished in 1992. It sits about a mile west of the rest of the cluster.
• The Shunned House, Benefit Street. A private house at 135 Benefit Street that still stands, and an address with an unusually high tenant turnover.
• The Tillinghast house. The laboratory of From Beyond, set back from Benevolent Street, about a fifth of a mile from the Shunned House.
• The Fleur-de-Lys Building, 7 Thomas Street. The studio of the sculptor Wilcox in The Call of Cthulhu; the building still stands, a hundred yards or so from the Shunned House. The Field Survey carries it as a pin of its own.
• Brown University. The post of Professor Angell, whose papers set the Cthulhu inquiry going, a little over a quarter of a mile away.
• Curwen's Pawtuxet farmhouse. About four and a half miles south of the Shunned House, in Pawtuxet village, where Joseph Curwen kept the laboratory and vaults that his descendant reopened (The Case of Charles Dexter Ward). The pin is region-level; the Archive does not give the lane.

Why Providence is the exception

The principal New England towns on file, Arkham, Kingsport, Innsmouth and Dunwich, are all stamped SUPPRESSED. Providence is not, and neither is Boston, which is why this office treats the two cities as fixed points from which the others can be reconciled. A researcher who has walked Benefit Street and Federal Hill has already seen the one part of the record that cannot be argued about.

Open any of these on the interactive map and the Providence preset frames the whole cluster at once.