CCNS Back Shore | Dune Shack 1

C-Scape

C-Scape is the best known of the shacks. It’s fairly easy to reach; it was well documented in the 2009 picture book, Dune Shack Summer, by Suzanne Lewis; and it’s open for occupancy to a limited number of writers and artists, through the nonprofit Provincetown Community Compact, run by Jay Critchley and Tom Boland, which has managed the shack since 1996 under agreement with the Park Service.

CCNS Back Shore | Dune Shack 2

Leo’s Place

The Noones brothers and Edward “Jake” Loring are credited with this shack, begun in the latter 1930s as a place for fishing and socializing. Howard Lewis, an upholsterer, bought it in 1952 or 1953. Leo Fleurant lived here year-round from 1963 until his death — in the shack — in 1984. In 1994, the Park service leased the shack jointly to Emily Beebe and Evelyn Simon, who continued to refer to it as “Leo’s Place.” It can be seen clearly from the Province Lands Visitors Center.

CCNS Back Shore | Dune Shack 3

 

This gable-roofed box, built in 1935 and moved in 1992, has housed the guests of the Adams family, from Shack 4.

CCNS Back Shore | Dune Shack 4

(Professors Row)

Jake Loring, the operator of Loring’s Taxi, and Dominic Avila, a carpenter, built this cottage as a Back Shore resort in 1935. It was acquired in 1953 by David William Adams, a professor at Western Michigan University, and Marcia (Cargill) Adams. Subject to a stipulation of settlement with the government, it can be occupied by the family until 2014.

CCNS Back Shore | Dune Shack 5

Mission Bell (Professors Row)

“Mission Bell” is the popular name for this cottage, although the bell in question — a useful navigational landmark out in the dunes — was salvaged in 1955 not from a mission but from a one-room schoolhouse in Michigan. It’s the shack closest to the Somerset wreck.

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Malicoat Cottage

The Malicoat cottage — the only one of the 18 that is still privately owned — aligns exactly with the family’s property at 312-320 Bradford Street, which once ran all the way to the Atlantic. The artist Philip Cecil Malicoat (1908-1981) built his first shack in 1948 or 1949 on what he believed to be the oceanside extension of his parcel.

CCNS Back Shore | Dune Shack 7

Euphoria

“Euphoria” is the larger of the two shacks that belonged to the writer and preservationist Hazel Hawthorne Werner (1901-2000) — if the adjective “larger” can be fairly applied to a 16-by-12-foot structure. It was built around 1930, apparently by the coast guardsman Frank “Spucky” Silva, who also built Thalassa (Shack 14).

CCNS Back Shore | Dune Shack 8

Dune Shack 8: Margo-Gelb

Almost exactly on the site of the Peaked Hill Bars Life-Saving Station is the last in a series of shacks built from the 1940s through the 1960s by the painters Boris Margo (1902-1995) and Jan Gelb (1906-1979), husband and wife.

CCNS Back Shore | Dune Shack 9

Kemp-Tasha

Fittingly, the most modest of the dune shacks casts the longest shadow, for this 8-by-12-foot structure is linked to Harry Kemp (1883-1960) — the Poet of the Dunes and, as the biographer William Brevda called him, the Last Bohemian. The shack’s earliest incarnation was as the hen house at the Peaked Hill Bars station. It was rebuilt by the surfman Frank Cadose, then owned by Frank Dears Henderson of the Coast Guard, who rented it to Kemp beginning in 1927 or 1928 and eventually gave it to him rather than listen any longer to Kemp’s ceaseless complaints. By the 40s, Kemp had largely squandered what slim reputation he’d enjoyed in serious circles. He had become a caricature: an ever eccentric, often besotted, unabashedly self-promoting poet — beloved by many, but just tolerated by others.

CCNS Back Shore | Dune Shack 10

Malkin-Jackson

By far the newest shack, this was reconstructed after a 1990 fire by volunteers working under Bill Fitts of the Peaked Hill Trust.

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Fowler Cottage

Because Laura and Stanley Fowler lived in the dunes almost year-round in this cottage, built in 1949, they had that rarity: an attached garage.

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Grail

Grace E. Bessay was a fierce preservationist. Her venue was federal court, where she battled the government for years over its condemnation of the “Grail,” among the most distinctive of the shacks.

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Frenchie’s Shack

Josephine (Couch) Del Deo, the town’s most influential preservationist, was a leader with Ross Moffett in the fight during the 50s and 60s to create a national seashore. She was still fighting, in 2010, to ensure that the shack she shared with her husband, Salvatore Del Deo, an artist and one-time restaurateur (Ciro & Sal’s and Sal’s Place), would be on the National Register of Historic Places, despite the fact that it dates to 1976. The original shack was built 30 years earlier for Jeanne “Frenchie” Chanel; chanteuse, naïf, “mystic, spiritualist, part bird, part creature of the unknown instincts man has lost,” as Del Deo wrote.

CCNS Back Shore | Dune Shack 14

Thalassa

“Thalassa” (θαλασσα) is the primal spirit of the sea and the name Hazel Hawthorne Werner gave to the smaller of her dune cottages. It was built in 1931 by the surfmen, and brothers, Louis and Frank “Spucky” Silva, who salvaged its windows from Eugene O’Neill’s life-saving station, gave it a front porch (now gone) and called it “Seagoin’.”

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Bratten-Schuster

C. Lawrence Schuster, a naturalist with Alpha Whale Watch, is currently the lone year-round resident of the dunes. The shack was built and first used by the surfmen John Cook and Joseph Medeiros.