'Alms house to Gallows Hill'

The House of the Seven Gables, built in Salem in 1668, in a 1915 photo. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous novel of the same name derives in part from his ruminations on the Puritan past of his family.

“Follow its lazy main street lounging
from the alms house to Gallows Hill
along a flat, unvaried surface
covered with wooden houses
aged by yellow drain
like the unhealthy hair of an old dog.
You’ll walk to no purpose
in Hawthorne’s Salem.’’

— From ‘Hawthorne,’’ by Robert Lowell