180 Bradford Street

The Gingerbread Gothic house, its remarkable occupants and its view over the rooftops of Lovetts Court have made this one of the most depicted places in town. The house was built c1850 by Capt. Caleb Cook, who made watch lubricant in the corner building. E. Ambrose Webster acquired it in 1900. His Summer School of Painting was at 463 Commercial Street but his own studio was here. After he died in 1935, his widow, Georgianna (Rodgers) Webster, leased the studio to the artist Gordon Hamm. She died in 1941. The property passed to her nephew, Karl Rodgers Sr., whose daughter, Delorma (Rodgers) Morton, owned it until 2008.

198 Bradford Street

At the heart of this house is a fish shed, built c1880 by the H. & S. Cook Company. It was turned into a barber shop that stood opposite Town Hall before being rolled here. Isaac Henry Caliga (1857-1944), a painter who studied in Munich, and his wife, Elizabeth Howland (1877-1960), who came to town in 1912 to study with Charles W. Hawthorne, lived here.

232 Bradford Street

Provincetown Bungalow Haven

A glimpse up the hillside might persuade you that some great Arts-and-Crafts Adirondack lodge had drifted down to the Cape, but then you realize it’s too crisp to be an antique. In fact, Richard P. “Rick” Wrigley‘s home was constructed above a complex called Provincetown Bungalow Haven, which includes four other houses that evoke both Stick and Shingle styles. One is a private dwelling. The others — Porch House, Treeviews and Bungalow — can be rented.

All were designed by Wrigley, a well-known furniture maker (represented in the Smithsonian American Art Museum) who acknowledges the tension in his work between artistry and craft. “I want it to be beautiful,” he said in a 2001 interview, “but it has to be functional.”

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Picture essay

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250 Bradford Street

The name of Mark Rothko (1903-1970) is not commonly associated with Provincetown, but he was indeed here for a few years, beginning in 1958, when he bought this house. He couldn’t sail, he didn’t like the beach and he sunburned badly, James E. B. Breslin noted in Mark Rothko: A Biography. In 1963, Rothko sold this place to the artists Tony Vevers (1926-2008) and Elspeth Halvorsen. By then, Vevers was well established, having had a solo show at the seminal Sun Gallery in 1958. He was one of the founders of the Long Point Gallery and was deeply involved in the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. In the 2008 Provincetown Arts, the artist Tabitha Vevers said of the Bradford Street studio, “It was where my father’s enduring love of life, and the sometimes humble beauty of the world around him, came together as art.”

256 Bradford Street

Long Point Post Office
The most important surviving civic building of the Long Point settlement, its Post Office, was built around 1830. What we see from the street was originally the rear of the structure. It lived a distinguished second life as the studio of the painter Herman Maril (1908-1986), whose work was championed in the 1930s by the collector Duncan Phillips. Maril acquired this property in the late 1950s and then, working with the artist Chester Pfeiffer, added a second-floor studio with north-facing windows, extending from the back of the house over a patio. Maril, Karl Knaths and Milton Avery collegially exchanged studio visits every summer, his widow Esta Maril recalled.

288A Bradford Street

 

Provincetown Picture Framing

Here’s a ramshackle-looking business that the old art colony would still happily recognize: Provincetown Picture Framing. The pedigree is more than shingle-deep. Shaun D. Pfeiffer, artisan, picture framer and proprietor of this little shop, was born next door. He is the son of the artist Chester “Chet” Pfeiffer and a grandson of the artist Heinrich Pfeiffer (1874-1956), who turned a waterside shed into the Artists Theatre, which became the Provincetown-Playhouse-on-the-Wharf.

292 Bradford Street

Hideaway Hill | Shore Galleries

Most towns don’t have a single octagonal house. Provincetown has two. There’s the landmark at 74 Commercial. Then there’s the Octagon, a remarkably organic creation designed by Jonathan Sinaiko and built as his home. Sinaiko, filmmaker and craftsman, is the son of the artists Avrom “Arlie” Sinaiko (1902-1984) and Suzanne Sinaiko (1918-1998). In 1959, they acquired a “great lot” — harbor to ocean — from the estate of Joseph W. Sears. Though subsequently truncated by the Cape Cod National Seashore, the property still comfortably holds an entire compound, called Hideaway Hill. One building houses Shore Galleries, which can claim descent from Donald Witherstine’s renowned Shore Studio Gallery, 47 Commercial, through Fred Hemley, a photographer and Witherstine’s grandson. Hemley, Sinaiko and Muffin Ray opened the gallery in 2006, devoting it largely to Provincetown artists. First among equals would be Arthur Cohen, whose summer home is nearby.

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Picture essay

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312-320 Bradford Street

The east and west lot lines of this property, if extended to the Atlantic, encompass the only privately-owned dune shack in the Cape Cod National Seashore. That’s because the property once did extend to the dune shack. Imagine: a house on Bradford Street with a back yard on the ocean! Both the shack and this family compound belong to the Malicoat clan, art-colony aristocracy, many of whom have lived or summered here. They include Florence (Bradshaw) Brown (±1870-1957); her daughter, the graphic artist Barbara Haven (Brown) Malicoat, who illustrated the Walking Tour booklets and is pictured at left with her husband, the painter Philip Cecil Malicoat (1908-1981), who studied with Charles W. Hawthorne and Henry Hensche, formed a triumvirate with Bruce McKain and George Yater, and bought this property.

Their son Conrad Malicoat, is a sculptor whose signature work is flowing brick chimneys and walls. His wife is Anne Lord and their daughters are Robena Malicoat, an artist who continues to use her grandfather Philip’s studio; Galen Malicoat and Bronwyn Malicoat. Conrad’s sister, Martha (Malicoat) Dunigan (±1934-2001); her husband, Philip Dunigan; and their daughters, Orin Dunigan, Breon Dunigan and Seanad Dunigan have also used the compound.

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Picture essay

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313 Bradford Street

There is a great bond between Provincetown and the Art Students League of New York, and Arthur Cohen is one of the most prominent links in that chain. He was at the League in 1950 and again in 1960 (having already studied with Edwin Dickinson at Cooper Union), shortly before arriving in town for the first time. Cohen — and his exquisitely understated landscapes — have been part of the scene ever since. He is married to the concert pianist Elizabeth Rodgers, who is a frequent subject of his work. They acquired this property in 1985. Cohen’s studio burned in 2008, but he was in New York at the time.

4 Brewster Street

Edwin Reeves Euler Building

Constructed in 1923 by the family of Frank Days Sr., owners of the lumberyard on Pearl Street where the Fine Arts Work Center evolved, 4 Brewster has been used ever since as housing and studio space for artists — like Jim Forsberg (1919-1991), Ross Moffett (1888-1971), Robert Motherwell (1915-1991), Seong Moy, Jim Peters, Myron Stout (1908-1987) and George Yater (1910-1993). The artist Edwin Reeves Euler (1896-1982) bought it in 1945 and, with Frances Euler, operated it as Euler Studios.

22 Brewster Street

Talk about paintings lining the walls! Here, they really did. After Louis Lima and Jerome Crepeau bought this barnlike house in 2002 and their renovation contractors began tearing out interior walls, they discovered 130 paintings on Upton board — many of them impressionistic “mudhead” portrait studies — nailed to the outside walls as insulation. These were a tangible reminder of the building’s history as a studio used by Henry Hensche (1901-1992), arguably first among equals of the disciples of Charles W. Hawthorne; then by James Kirk Merrick (1905-1985), a student of Hensche’s; and then by Lois Griffel, another Hensche student, who continued his Cape Cod School of Art nearby until 2000. Lima and Crepeau salvaged all but six of the paintings, which they left in situ as artistic Easter eggs, for the pleasure of a future owner to discover.

23 Brewster Street

For more than half of a century – much of that time here – Lillian Orlowsky (1914-2007) and William Freed (1904-1984) shared their lives and their evolution as abstract artists. They “left a strong stamp, both socially and artistically, on the art worlds of New York and Provincetown,” The Boston Globe said in 2008.

† CCNS Back Shore | First Peaked Hill Bars Station

 

In the mid-19th century, this unsheltered stretch was peppered with rude huts, built by the Massachusetts Humane Society, where shipwreck survivors might ride out the storm. But most crew members marooned on the sand bars couldn’t even get as far as the beach, perishing instead as their vessels were torn apart beneath them. So the government took a more proactive role, begininng in the 1870s, through the U.S. Life-Saving Service.

7 Carnes Lane

Quiet Carnes Lane is home to the indomitable, inimitable, irrepressible Jay Critchley (b 1947), an artist, political activist, civic advocate and all-around sui generic figure; one of those people whom you almost cannot imagine thriving anywhere else. His works have included imaginatively stinging rebukes to the gentrification and commodification of the town; and his anger is evident that A-list arrivistes seem so eager to turn their backs on any references to the town’s transgressive past. But Critchley is no cynical bomb-tosser. His devotion to Provincetown is especially evident in the event with which he’s now most closely associated: the annual Provincetown Harbor Swim for Life & Paddler Flotilla, which has raised over two million dollars for local AIDS services, women’s health providers and youth organizations.

3 Carver Court

3 Carver Court, from the Assessor’s Office (2013).

Carver Court, a little midblock passage formerly known as Court Place, is very close to the Gifford House. In fact, the Gifford family was connected with this property until 1913, when it was acquired by Margaret J. Ramos, who owned it until 1929. She and her husband sold the house that year to Betty Lockett Spencer, the wife of the prominent precisionist painter Niles Spencer (1893-1952). To my eyes, anyway, Spencer’s enormously appealing work combines Stuart Davis’s joyful cubism with Charles Sheeler’s sharp focus on industrial landscapes. His rendition of the Unitarian-Universalist Meeting House is an enduringly fresh take on that beautiful — but clichéd — icon. Even more delightful a surprise is Spencer’s take on the scrolled bracket over a doorway. Both Universalist Church, Provincetown and Provincetown Corner are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Spencer had a studio in the former shirt factory at 26 Court Street, but he was using this house in the 1930s and perhaps until the early ’40s, when he and Betty were divorced. His death merited an obituary in The New York Times.

By 1946, Betty’s new husband, Ernest L. Perry, a native of São Miguel in the Azores, had set up his public accountancy practice at 3 Carver Court, offering bookkeeping, auditing, and income tax preparation; as well as help with Social Security, withholding and unemployment claims. He died six months after Spencer, in November 1952. His business telephone number, 31, was perpetuated as her home phone number, 487-0031, after Provincetown switched to automated dialing.

In 1982, following Betty Perry’s death, the property passed to the couple’s two daughters, Doris and Muriel, and their husbands, Ralph J. Westnedge and Charles Veloza. Veloza’s estate sold 3 Carver Street in 2013 to Scott Watters and Richard D. Porreca, a residential and commercial construction project manager and an illustrator whose pen-and-ink line drawings of Provincetown architecture can seen on the Facebook page, Inked Well Illustrations.

Porreca told me in 2015 that he and Watters had found pieces of Spencer’s artwork in the attic of the home and, during a renovation, evidence that the house had been constructed on a foundation of ship’s masts.

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Consult the documents or view the images

3 Central Street

With his occasionally psychedelic palette and his boldly juxtaposed forms, Oliver Newberry Chaffee Jr. (1881-1944) was a “modern before modernism was popular,” Ross Moffett said. But his accomplished Fauvism — good enough to get him into the famous 1913 Armory Show in New York — could not disguise what looks like tremendous affection for his subjects. As a result of their exuberant but disciplined spirit, Chaffee’s century-old paintings hold up remarkably well; better, certainly, than those by many of his contemporaries. His other artistic legacy was as the husband of Ada Gilmore, a watercolorist and printmaker, many of whose works complement his. This plain house on Central Street is where Chaffee lived through the early 1940s.

6 Central Street

The year 1944 saw the death of two giants who lived across the street from one another: Oliver Chaffee from the world of art and, from the mariners’ realm, Capt. George H. Bickers of the United States Life Saving Service, who lived at 6 Central Street, a structure that dates to about 1830. “Captain Bickers belonged to the now fast-vanishing race of men who spent their lives intimately with the seas in the days of sailing vessels with all the dangers attendant upon that traffic,” The Advocate said in his obituary. He came from a time before the Coast Guard’s mechanized equipment, “when rescues were made with brawn and sheer, downright courage.”

8 Commercial Street

 
Rich in associations but hard to see from the road, 8 Commercial Street was once home to the abstract painter Karl Knaths, whom The New York Times called “a musician in color”; his wife, Helene; and her sister, Agnes Weinrich, who cofounded the New York Society of Women Artists. Out of sight and off limits to the public is the tiny spartan shack in which Tennessee Williams spent time in 1944 while he was finishing The Glass Menagerie. Harold Norse, who would later write Memoirs of a Bastard Angel, lived with him for six weeks. Williams signed his name to a door and a wall here.

30 Commercial Street

 
This was the summer home and studio of Jack Tworkov (1900-1982), whom The New York Times called “one of the most respected artists of the New York School.” Tworkov emigrated from Poland in 1913, worked with John Dos Passos in the 30s and took up Abstract Expressionism in the 40s. He bought this house in 1958 and added a studio. Tworkov’s students included Jennifer Bartlett, Jonathan Borofsky and Richard Serra. He died in 1982 and is buried in the Town Cemetery with his wife, Rachel; not far from Stanley and Elise Kunitz, who were neighbors on this side as well.

32 Commercial Street

 
This was once the densest, most complex and most poignant garden in town — by design. The garden, together with an extraordinary body of poetry, was the life work of the poet Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006), a founder of the Fine Arts Work Center. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1959, the Bollingen Prize in 1987, the National Medal of the Arts in 1993, the National Book Award in 1995 and then, in 2000, at the age of 95 — when most people think about slowing down a bit — he was named Poet Laureate of the United States. Kunitz spent almost 50 years in Provincetown. “I conceived of the garden as a poem in stanzas,” he told The New York Times in 2005. “Each terrace contributes to the garden as a whole in the same way each stanza in a poem has a life of its own.”

52 Commercial Street

 
La Principessa

A splash of pink, this 1850s house at 52 Commercial Street is known as “La Principessa.” It was here that John Whorf, a water-colorist whom The Advocate called the “jewel in the crown of many noted Provincetown artists,” rode out the hurricane of 1944. Though born in Winthrop, he came to town at a young age to visit his grandfather Isaiah. Handsome and worldly, he became a consummate town insider, serving as Skipper of the Beachcombers, but was also well-known off-Cape.

56 Commercial Street

 
Our Summer Place

“Tod Lindenmuth should know the meaning of Provincetown,” The New York Times declared in 1927. “For years he has been absorbing the jumble of its wharves and streets and resolving it into unified compositions in wood-block prints and paintings.” And for 15 of those years — from 1925 to 1940 — he and his wife, the illustrator Elizabeth Boardman Warren (1886-1980), lived at 56 Commercial Street, which was built in the 1840s and still shows a lot of handsome Greek Revival detail. Lindenmuth left a handful of unsigned studies in the house. They are still in the hands of Margaret and Donald Murphy, whose family has owned the property since 1954 and rents out Lindenmuth’s studio and a comfortable two-story former salt shed under the name Our Summer Place. (More than one guest over the years must have taken satisfaction from honestly telling friends, “Oh, we’re just going to Our Summer Place on the Cape.”)

69 Commercial Street

 

Alice Brock Studio | R & R Place

Anyone of a Certain Age will almost certainly share the author’s quiet pleasure in knowing that Alice M. (Pelkey) Brock, the Alice of Alice’s Restaurant, wound up practicing her delightful art right here in Provincetown. She moved to Cape Cod in 1979 and declared three decades later that she was grateful for every “beautiful day in paradise” (Jane Roy Brown,  “After Alice’s Restaurants,” The Boston Globe, 24 February 2008). “Thank God for the National Seashore,” she said. “There’s still the beautiful light, and there are still a few crackpots left. I never want to go anywhere. People say, ‘Don’t you want to go away in the winter?’ The only place I would want to go would be a place like this, and I’m here now.”

72A Commercial Street

 
William Maynard Studio
Built as Sol Nickerson’s workshop, this small shed-style cottage at 72A Commercial Street was once F. Coulton Waugh’s painting studio. (Waugh and his wife also operated shops in 72 Commercial Street.) One of Waugh’s best known and most delightful compositions — a cross between his work as a painter and as an illustrator — is A Map of Cape Cod (1926). The building is now the studio of William Maynard (b 1921). A sign in the yard invites passersby to watch Maynard at work. ArkArt‘s thumbnail biography, by Donnell Walker, says: “William Maynard is a graduate of the school of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He also studied for two years at Massachusetts College of Art.

76 Commercial Street

 
Frederick Waugh – Hans Hofmann Studio

Doric columns, serious and sturdy, hold up a prominent pediment that marks this exceptionally handsome facade from the early 1800s. For a century or so, 76 Commercial Street was owned by the Nickerson and Freeman families.

84 Commercial Street

 
Phyllis Handwrought Jewelry

The plaque on 84 Commercial Street states that it was built in 1797, a date accepted by the Historic District Survey with the considerable caveat that the building was “heavily altered over time.” Among other features, it gained a full-length shed dormer and lost its porch. For about 35 years, until 1947, Emma Agnes Cudois had run a millinery shop out of her home here. It was also known for a time as the Wiletta House. Then, in 1966, Phyllis and Israel Sklar of New York moved their jewelry and gift store here from 407/379 Commercial Street.

112 Commercial Street

 
As you approach the Turn in Commercial Street from the east, you may think you’re being watched. You are. A bust of William Shakespeare has taken up more-or-less permanent residence in a second-floor window at No. 112. Year in and year out, window open or shut, the ghostly little Bard casts his eyes over the West End Rialto.

119 Commercial Street

 
Few narratives, fiction or nonfiction, convey as warm and intimate a sense of Provincetown as Frank X. Gaspar‘s beguiling novel, Leaving Pico (University Press of New England, 1999). The story — about a transformative summer in the life of a Portuguese-American family and about our common hunger for just enough nobility to hold our heads high — is centered on the West End home of its young narrator, Josie Carvalho. So it’s inevitable, if treacherous, to look at 119 Commercial Street, where Gaspar (b ±1946) grew up in the 1950s, and wonder just how much of this house is in Leaving Pico. “The book is not a memoir, nor is it sociology or history,” Gaspar said in an interview presented on the University Press of New England Web site.

† 219 Commercial Street

Provincetown Printers
“Six artists formed the Provincetown Printers in 1915, developing a unique method of woodcut printing, making single block or ‘white line’ prints,” Nyla Ahrens wrote in Provincetown: The Art Colony. “The method lent itself to personal cubist styles soon developed by Agnes Weinrich and Blanche Lazzell. By 1918 the enlarged group established a gallery on the site of the present Post Office and sent traveling shows through the United States, Canada and Europe.”

296A Commercial Street

 
Moffett House Inn

Now the Moffett House Inn bed-and-breakfast, this charmingly situated house was built around 1820 in the Federal style. The home of Ross Moffett and Dorothy Lake Gregory Moffett “was used by them for over 50 years as a residence and painting studio,” Josephine Del Deo wrote. “Although Moffett painted in several other locations until 1964, his wife used the premises for her work as a painter and illustrator during most of the period from 1933 to 1975. Ross Moffett was one of the deans of American painting and lived in Provincetown from 1913 to his death in 1971.” He was the author of Art in Narrow Streets (1964), an account of the development of the art scene in Provincetown in the early 20th century, which you can still find in local bookstores.

347 Commercial Street

Bill Evaul Studios and Gallery

The building was constructed in the middle decades of the 19th century and was shown as a paint shop in 1858. In the early 20th century, the property was owned by Jeremiah Atwood Rich (d 1932), who conducted the J. A. Rich grocery store for 50 years. (“Funeral Is Held For Mrs. M. J. Rich,” The Advocate, 17 June 1937.)

Hong Ting Wong (b ±1898), the artist and restaurateur responsible for the Cape Cod Tea Garden, at 327 Commercial Street, and Wong’s Restaurant, at 334 Commercial Street, also operated Wong’s Cozy Den Coffee Shop in this building in the late 1930s, serving fried chicken, chicken chop suey and chicken chow mein.

† 351C Commercial Street

 
Blanche Lazzell Cottage

It’s been a full decade now, but it’s still hard to think that a building of such historic significance — the longtime waterfront studio of Blanche Lazzell (1878-1956), one of the most significant artists of Provincetown, which was depicted on the cover of 1989 monograph Blanche Lazzell — could have slipped under the radar and on to the rubble pile in 2002.

353½ Commercial Street

 
Julius Katzieff-Heather Bruce Studio

Among the last of the old, working, waterfront art studios in Provincetown is that used by the painter Heather Bruce (b 1957). Its lineage is impeccable, as it was constructed by her great-grandfather, Frank A. Days (±1849-1937), who was the town’s premier builder and the man whose lumber and coal yard — now the Fine Arts Work Center — once housed artists’ studios. Though it appears to be part of Angels’ Landing, 353½ (or 353C) Commercial Street occupies its own separate tax lot and is still owned by the Days/Bruce family.

† 397 Commercial Street

 
Cape Cod School of Art

An intriguing discovery on a 1919 street atlas from John G. Edwards is that the small building on the site of what is now the Ernden Fine Art Gallery was identified as the “Cap[e] Cod School of Art.” This corresponds neatly with a caption in the Scrapbooks of Althea Boxell (Book 6, Page 5): “The beginning of the Hawthorne art class. About 1900. On beach, just below Lizzie’s shop” — a reference to Lizzie Livingston’s Candy Shop at 409 Commercial Street.

402 Commercial Street

 
For at least two decades, from the late 1950s through the late 1970s (if not longer on either end), this was the studio of the prominent portraitist Samuel Edmund Oppenheim (1901-1992), a student of Charles W. Hawthorne and Harvey Dunn.

411 Commercial Street

 
Four Eleven Studio

This large building has served as an accommodation of one kind or another for more than a half century. Until the early 1960s, it was the Francis Guest House, owned by Joseph T. Francis (±1894-1958), a retired fish buyer and World War I naval hero, and his wife, Irene Abbott Francis. By 1964, it was an efficiency apartment house called the Avlon’s, owned by the artists Helen (Avlonitis) Daphnis-Avlon (±1933-2004) and Nassos Daphnis (1914-2010). Sheila G. LaMontagne and her sister [?], Madelyn N. Carney, bought the property from the Daphnis couple in 1976. It was renamed the Mary Russell Guest House. Carney, an artist, bought out her sister three years later. She has lived and worked here, as has her daughter, the artist Liz Carney.

418A Commercial Street

The painter Lodewyck Bruckman (1903-1980), a native of the Netherlands who had studied at the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague, maintained his studio in this crest-top aerie in the late 1950s and early 60s. It was called the Royal Dutch Art Gallery and it showed his work and that of Evert Zeeven, otherwise known as E-7.

424 Commercial Street

 
Albert Merola Gallery

The Albert Merola Gallery, under the proprietorship of Albert Merola and James Balla, reached the quarter-century mark in 2012 as one of the most respected galleries in town, showing the works of Fritz Bultman, Pat de Groot, Donna Flax, Michael Mazur, Tabitha Vevers and John Waters, among others. The commercial space served as the Zoltan Gluck Art Gallery from 1967 to 1972, before Gluck moved to 398 Commercial. Residential tenants in the building have included the artist Susan Baker and the potter Peggy R. Prichett, who also served on the town’s Art Commission. These photographs of her apartment and her artwork were taken in 2009.

457 Commercial Street

 
Three generations of very gifted Richters — Mischa (1910-2001), his son Dan (b 1939), and Dan’s sons Sacha (b 1968) and Mischa (b 1971) — have traveled in Provincetown orbits at some point or other. This was the home of Mischa grand-père for the last 23 years of his life. (A profile appears on Provincetown Artist Registry.) The most nationally renowned of the family group, Mischa Richter was a cartoonist for The New Yorker from 1942 to 2000, whose work tended toward the gently sly, like two dogs, dressed in business suits and standing upright in front of a door with a “No Dogs Allowed” sign on it. Says one to the other, “We’ve got a class-action suit if ever I saw one.” (A selection of his work can be seen on The Cartoon Bank.) The cartoon editor of The New Yorker said at the time of Richter’s death: “He was a joyous man and was bubbling over with ideas. Bubbled throughout his life.”

459 Commercial Street

 
Sacha Richter Studio

On the east end of the waterfront lot his father bought in 1978, the artist Daniel Richter (b 1939) built a large home and studio in 2005. His son, the painter Sacha Richter (b 1968), supervised construction and contributed a good deal to the design. It now serves as Daniel’s Provincetown home and as Sacha’s studio. Born in London, where his father was working at the time, Sacha Richter studied at the Studio Arts Center International in Florence and earned a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the Massachusetts College of Art.

463 Commercial Street

 
Flagship

The Flagship, with its renowned and utterly improbable dory bar, is one of those cherished institutions that’s missed even by people who never knew it. Built and used at first by the artist E. Ambrose Webster (pictured at left) as an instructional studio, it was for many years the place to dine and drink in the East End. Its history is interwoven with that of the Beachcombers next door, at 465A Commercial. Part pier shed, part foundry, part wharf, part studio, it’s hard to tell where the Flagship leaves off and where the Beachcombers begin. For a time in the 1930s, the Flagship catered the Beachcomber dinners, making the distinction between them even tougher to discern. But the spirit of the Flagship endures, though it’s a private home now. And as long as there’s a dory bar in place, there will always be a Flagship.

465A Commercial Street

 
Hulk (Beachcombers’ clubhouse) | (Former) William Boogar Foundry | McGuire Gallery and Studio

You could walk dozens of times past this nondescript old waterfront building — the Hulk is its official designation — without realizing that it has long been a locus of power, influence and camaraderie in the Provincetown art colony. I certainly did. And you know what? The Beachcombers are fine with that. They deliberately assume a low profile. Almost nothing about the Hulk gives away its purpose publicly, except a small hand-painted sign saying, “Parking only while in the Beachcombers.”

So who are the Beachcombers? Think: Century Association and Skull & Bones — in a camel costume. That is, an arts organization that takes its mission and itself quite seriously, but that can’t help indulge sometimes in hijinks that would have been more or less appropriate for a boys’ summer camp. It is no coincidence that it was founded two years after the Provincetown Art Association across the street, and by many of the same people. As the art colony grew in the early 20th century, it needed both a place to exhibit its work seriously and a place to fraternize privately. Its 1916 constitution said its purpose was “to promote good fellowship among men sojourning or resident in or about Provincetown who are engaged in the practice of the fine arts or their branches” or “who are intimately connected with the promotion of the fine arts” — defined to mean painting, etching, engraving, sculpture, architecture, designing, illustrating, writing, music and acting. Officers, committees and events were given maritime names.

466 Commercial Street

 
Kibbe Cook – Mary Heaton Vorse House

Your perspective on Provincetown was shaped in some measure by Mary Heaton Vorse (1881-1966), the author of Time and the Town: A Provincetown Chronicle (1942), whose house this was from 1907 until her death in 1966. An ardent progressivist and champion of labor — a “militant liberal,” The New York Times said in her obituary — Vorse was deeply involved with the Provincetown Players. In her book, she depicts the town with the convincing skill of a W.P.A. muralist. It’s not that she glosses over fissures, but she imbues her characters — Portuguese, Yankee or washashore; fisherman, homemaker or playwright — with proletarian nobility and the capacity to put aside differences and work shoulder-to-shoulder in the town’s best interests.

479 Commercial Street

 
Anchorage

The name Anchorage perfectly described this house, since it served as the ancestral hearth of the four generations of artists in the Brown-Malicoat family, easily the largest and perhaps the most influential of the 20th-century art dynasties in Provincetown. This was the home, at least as far back as the 1920s, of Harold Haven Brown (1869-1932); his wife, Florence Bradshaw Brown (b 1868); and their daughters, Beatrice Bradshaw Brown (±1899-1952) and Barbara Haven (Brown) Malicoat (1903-1987), who’s shown in this picture with her husband, Philip Cecil Malicoat, posing before the Anchorage bulkhead with their children.

507 Commercial Street

 
A glimpse into the yard is all you need: this is Old Provincetown. Classic Provincetown. Bohemian Provincetown. Scintillating, eccentric, tatterdemalion, devil-may-care. And the visual clues like a dragon-like sculpture of lights lacing the foliage, serene Buddhas below, add to the aura that creative souls dwell within. And they certainly do. For nearly a half-century, 507 Commercial has been the home of one of the town’s most prolific artists, Pat de Groot. A Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant recipient, de Groot is known among other things for her series of cormorant portraits — they are nothing less than portraits — and for serenely small seascapes inspired by the limitless and ever-changing scene that greets her. In her words: “I want to grab a piece of all this, of this sacred place, and say something with paint about the sky and the sea and the horizon and how it affects me.”

510 Commercial Street

 
Given the simplicity of the historical Cape Cod dwelling, profound transformations can occur with what sound like nominal additions: a dormer here, a portico there, a new chimney, and soon you have something that only a practiced eye could recognize as a three-quarter Cape. This house — home over time to Capt. Lewis B. Pinckney, the artist Oscar H. Gieberich, and Irma and Kurt Ruckstuhl — was virtually unchanged from the 1830s through the 1970s, but has been radically altered since.

516 Commercial Street

 
Gerrit Hondius Studio | Fine Arts Work Center

It’s fitting that this sweet little home and studio should belong to the Fine Arts Work Center, since it is associated with at least five of the artists whose careers have enriched the town’s cultural life: Robert Motherwell, Maurice Sterne, Irving Marantz, Gerrit Hondius and Paul Bowen. Hondius (1891-1970) is most closely associated with this propery, since this was his summer home and studio from 1962 until his death eight years later. His widow, Paula (Kessler) Hondius, a pianist and piano instructor, donated the property to the center in 1980.

522 Commercial Street

 
We’re entering Whorf territory now. (The vicarage at St. Mary of the Harbor was owned by the Whorf family.) In the 1850s, Sarah Whorf owned this handsome full Cape, built in the late 18th century. The anomalous layout of the property, with such a deep front yard, is testimony to a time when there was no Commercial Street, and is one of the features suggesting the great age of this house, as is the central chimney. Arnold Geissbuhler (1897-1997), a sculptor well represented at St. Mary’s, lived here at one point, according to the Massachusetts Historical Commission Inventory of 1973-1977, as did the sculptor William Boogar and the writer George Grotz.

528 Commercial Street

 
Still very much in Whorf territory, this lovely full Cape bears a plaque saying it was built in 1796, and that seems a perfectly reasonable claim. By the mid-19th century, the property was owned by Thomas R. Whorf. The artist Charles Kaeselau (1889-1972) made his home here with his wife, Marguerite. His gallery at one time was at 284 Commercial Street and he is well represented in the collection of the Seamen’s Bank, 221-223 Commercial. Bart Wirtz, the principal cellist with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and a faculty member of the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, also made his summer home here. The artist Elisabeth Pearl (b 1945), one of whose works is shown on the Provincetown Artist Registry, now owns the house with Sandra Lee Smith.

† 531 Commercial Street

This ordinary house in the Historic District stirred up an extraordinary amount of recrimination in 2006 when it was torn down by its new owners, Richard L. Bready, chairman and chief executive of Nortek Inc., and his wife, Cheryl. The drama followed a predictable arc: the Breadys were permitted to “replace the wood shingle roofing, flashing and exterior trim; and add new windows and doors, wood siding and deck.” (Pru Sowers, “Historic House Razed,” The Banner, 11 January 2007.)