HISTORY’S EDGE IN PROVINCETOWN
Whatever your preconception is of Provincetown, Massachusetts, it is almost surely incomplete. The tiny town of 3,000 permanent residents, situated at the very tip of Cape Cod, swells to 60,000 between June and August and harbors a wide variety of experiences for a curious traveler.
The east end of town is the surprise location of the first artists colony in the United States, and continues to be home to numerous galleries featuring mostly local artists. The creative people began arriving in the late 1800s, lured by the remoteness, stark beauty and colors of the seaside landscape, with its thousands of acres of white dunes speckled with scrub oak bent by the wind, green sea grasses and the natural cranberry bogs that exist where the aquifer pierces the sand.
The 60-plus art galleries are concentrated along the east end of Commercial Street, where it is not unusual to find a gallery at street level, another on the second floor and a third in the basement, all in the same 1900-era building. Look carefully and there might be another down the alley.
On the west side of Provincetown, at the opposite end of Commercial Street, is a residential area featuring a remarkable parade of homes. Their history and their most notable occupants are amply described in a free Historic Provincetown Walking Tour brochure.
Beside legendary occupants such as Norman Mailer and Eugene O’Neill, as well as a profusion of sea captains and explorers, several are identified as “floaters” by a white-on-blue plaque depicting a house aboard a scow at sea. Beginning in 1818, each home had been built on a spit of land several miles offshore surrounded by water teeming with fish, and occupied by fishermen and their families. As the fishing grounds depleted by the late 1860s, 40 of the homes were salvaged and “floated” into town, where they remain firmly attached to the soil.
At the western end of Commercial Street is a very small park in the middle of a roundabout commemorating the spot where the Mayflower landed in 1620, with approximately 120 passengers and crew, before sailing on a few weeks later to the much better-known second landing at Plymouth Rock.
To commemorate the “first” landing of the Mayflower, a 252-foot granite monument was erected in 1910 on a hill overlooking Provincetown. To say it dominates the skyline in a community where few buildings are more than 30 feet tall is an understatement. Modeled as a replica of the 14th-century Torre di Mangia in Siena, Italy, the slim tower functions as an “exclamation point” at the tip of the cape, ensuring people remember this is where the settling of America actually commenced. In fact, the Mayflower Compact, a set of rules for self-governance in America, was conceived in the Provincetown harbor.
Sandwiched between the art galleries and the residential area, Commercial Street becomes a plethora of distinctive shops and restaurants housed in buildings dating to the late 1880s, many backing up to Provincetown harbor. While there are tourist fudge and souvenir shops, many of the stores are one-of-a-kind. For example, The Marine Specialties Store is identified by a bin of colorfully painted buoys on the street, followed by a bin of $5 T-shirts with a sign they are $2 if you “find a hole in one.”
Browsing further into the depths of the oneperson-wide aisles, the store becomes a costume shop before morphing into a cuckoo selection of merchandise, from authentic, historically significant swords to Ruth Bader Ginsberg hand puppets in a rack with Tibetan prayer flags made in Nepal. Look up, and a suspended museum of nautical antiques dangles from the ceiling.
Few tourists visit the town library on Commercial Street, thus missing one of the most unusual reading rooms found in any library in the world. On the second floor, surrounded by bookcases, a 66-foot (but still half scale) replica of the 1905 schooner Rose Dorothea pierces the walls, while the mast goes up through the ceiling and into the steeple of what was a church in 1860. Instead of a ship-in-a-bottle, this is a ship-ina-library!
The commercial section of Commercial Street might also be the premier people-watching spot in America, made all the more enjoyable by many restaurants featuring street-side, underthe-umbrella tables, and a village that prides itself on being a community where everyone is welcomed and accepted “as they are.” Rainbow flags and banners, American flags, families with kids on a father’s shoulders, and men and women with “colorful art in their hair” are as abundant as the shirtless bicycle riders and pedicabs that ramble in the opposite direction of automobiles traveling the narrow, supposedly one-way street.
Another distinctive section of Provincetown (or “P-Town” as it is often called) is the thousands of acres of surrounding dunes that make up the Cape Cod National Seashore, now protected from development. It is the domain of Art’s Dune Tours, which has been offering hourlong trips into the acres of sand for over 70 years. Guides present information about the flora and fauna and a history of the dunes while traveling over the undulating mounds of sand in fourwheel-drive SUVs.
The tours also pass near some of the oceanfront shacks that were erected on the dunes beginning in the 1920s. Reportedly made with the flotsam of shipwrecks, the flimsy but enduring abodes were an appealing oasis to many artists and writers attracted to the solitude they found inspiring while writing or painting. Mailer, O’Neill, Jack Kerouac, e.e. cummings and Jackson Pollock have all resided in the shacks.
There are 19 remaining in what is now a historic district, and 18 are owned by the National Park Service, while one is still privately owned. Anyone is welcome to enter a lottery for an opportunity to reside for a week in one of the dwellings, which “feature” no electricity, running water or plumbing.
For the adventurous, there is no lack of waterbased options in Provincetown. Seal and whale watching tours leave from MacMillan Pier at the center of town. Kayaks and paddleboards can be rented, and guests are welcomed aboard the 1925 schooner Hindu and the Bay Lady II for daily sailings in the harbor. Powerboats and sailboats can be rented, and many yachts at the town marina offer deep-sea fishing.
Nighttime ghost tours have no end of scary stories to relate, given the hundreds of pre1900-era buildings, and an equal number of shipwrecks just off the coast. Bicycle rentals are abundant, with some paved trails winding though the dune fields.
If none of those options are appealing, Mooncusser Tattoo offers several six-week tattoo and piercing instructional summer camps.