the New City Markings

All residents of Providence have noticed the cryptic graffiti covering their city's sidewalks and streets: arrows, mostly; as well as lines, dashed and solid; arcs; stars; circles; moons; and more. Few have stopped to wonder what they mean. This is yet another example of the deadly lack of curiousity that infects Providence's long-term inhabitants. It cannot be coincidental. Something in this city kills one's urge to look, and to know. Is it the city's self-preservation, stopping people from investigating too much? Or is it human preservation, for if one knew what was really happening here, one might, like some kind of Lovecraftian hero, go mad?

The city's graffiti has long been thought, by those who do think of it, to be a kind of code. Not only do the shapes and placement of the graffiti hold meaning, but so do the colors in which they are written. The meaning of the code has long been debated, however. Some known satanic symbolism is easily noted: the rising path of Jupiter intersecting with the November Dog Star, for instance, in this piece at the corner of Benevolent and George Streets:





But just who was communicating with whom, and, of course, what was being communicated, has never been satisfactorily decided. Are they an elaborate datebook? "Meet here, at 7pm, on May 28th, for black mass?"



Perhaps simply satanic tourist trails? "Underneath this house lies the body of John J. Kraemer, noted dentist and pedophile, who donated his blood and semen to The Cause in 1954."



Are they warnings? Or spells? Summonings of demons to invade a particular house, or the equivalent of a witch's drawing of a pentagram in salt to cast a curse?



Louise Marie MacDougal, a professor of History at Brown University from 1967-1982 specializing in New England religion and government and their intersections, theorized that they were architectural in meaning. She believed that these symbols were something like a giant, life-sized blueprint for a whole other city laid atop this one. Her early research off-handedly assumed that this "other city" was an ancient one that had existed long before Providence was ever conceived of: something Native American in origin, or, according to one of her few surviving diaries, something "even older." Her later work, however, began to very gently speculate that perhaps these were plans for a new city - one which was about to be built on Providence's ruins.



MacDougal is dead, now, of course. The fires that destroyed her house and her university office in the same night also took her life, her notes, diaries, and papers, and her detailed and extensive maps of this "new city." Scraps and pieces of those maps that have somehow survived have found their way onto the internet, though much of what you will find will be forgeries. The fire left no surviving notes to indicate when construction might begin.