Howard Phillips Lovecraft

The Street Howard Phillips Lovecraft

The story traces the history of the eponymous street in a New England city, presumably Boston, from its first beginnings as a path in colonial times to a quasi-supernatural occurrence in the years immediately following World War I. As the city grows up around the street, it is planted with many trees and built along with "simple, beautiful houses of brick and wood," each with a rose garden. As the Industrial Revolution runs its course, the area degenerates into a run-down, polluted slum, with all of the street's old houses falling into disrepair. After World War I and the October Revolution, the area becomes home to a community of Jewish Russian immigrants; among the new residents are the leadership of a "vast band of terrorists" who are plotting the destruction of the United States on Independence Day. When the day arrives, the terrorists gather to do the deed, but before they can get started, all the houses in the street collapse concurrently on top of them, killing them all. An observer at the scene testified that immediately after the collapse, he had seen visions of the trees and the rose gardens that had once been in the street.