A few years ago, I took the photo of the former Fowle’s soda fountain/newsstand in Newburyport, Massachusetts. It’s now a café but still sports the old neon sign and the Art Deco lettering on the façade. I started wondering about Fowle’s after re-reading HP Lovecraft’s wonderfully unhinged novella “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” Was it the inspiration for Hammond’s Drug Store mentioned at the start of the story? Fowle’s operated from 1903-2012, the location matches up (State Street), and drug stores often had soda fountains. I can just imagine someone in 1931, sitting on a stool and sipping a milkshake, staring out and seeing the baleful bard of Providence on the other side of the window. HP wrote “Innsmouth” a few months after his second visit to Newburyport in that year.
Bust of HP Lovecraft, Providence Athenaeum
But it is not that quaint and historic town that is main setting of this classic Weird Tale. Instead, it is in front of Fowle’s that the story’s inquisitive but unheedful narrator—a recently graduated college man on a low-budget tour of New England—waits for the “rattletrap” bus to fictional Innsmouth, the mysterious and decrepit fishing port that is openly loathed and feared by its neighbors.
Despite the warnings and his own “spontaneous aversion” on seeing this terror bus, the narrator not only boards it but gets off in Innsmouth to have himself a look-see. He comes to learn that the town is under the subjugation of Lovecraft’s dreaded Deep Ones. They are super-intelligent (but not exactly benign) fish-like creatures that have no aversion—spontaneous or otherwise—when it comes to the practice of inter-species miscegenation.
Abandoned church in Gloucester, Mass. In Innsmouth, the former Christian house of worship has been turned into “The Esoteric Order of the Dragon.” Don’t even ask.
Let’s just say that this Innsmouth place is so bad that in the story’s prelude we learn that a team of federal agents are eventually compelled to burn and dynamite the town into oblivion, after carrying the stunted citizenry off to undisclosed “gaols” or maybe even “concentration camps.”
Lovecraft’s protagonists were imprudent, but you don’t have to be. There is no bus stop in front of the old Fowle’s building anymore, but if you ever summon a taxi or Uber ride from there and the driver looks a little “fishy,” DON’T GET IN!!
Text and Photos by Rick Ouellette
