8 Carver Street

 
Brass Key Guesthouse
The Queen Anne House, a unit of the Brass Key Guesthouse compound, is a wondrously eclectic confection of many gables, Carpenter Gothic detailing and gorgeous Ionic columns. As transient lodging, the house has returned to its role in the 19th century, when it was the Cottage Inn, a boarding house run by Caleb Cook. It is also strongly associated with both the nearby Gifford House and the old First National Bank of Provincetown. That connection was first embodied in the person of Moses Nickerson Gifford, whose home this was until his death in 1918. Gifford was the son of James Gifford, namesake of the hotel up the street. He went into the banking business, beginning in 1866 as a cashier at the national bank. Twenty-two years later, in 1888, Gifford assumed the presidency of the bank, which he held for three full decades. But that alone greatly understates his civic role.

9-11 Carver Street

 
Gifford House Inn
In a resort town where accommodations come and go by the year — and by the dozens — the Gifford House Inn is an astonishing stalwart. It is more than 140 years old. With 77 Bradford Street, it occupies the crest of Mill Hill, from which surprisingly generous vistas of the town and harbor can be enjoyed. Beautiful, it is not. Grand, it is not. But with 26 guest rooms and the Club Purgatory, Porchside Lounge and Thai Sushi Café by Ying, it’s certainly lively. And that’s saying a lot for a hotel of its age — whatever that age may be.

10 Carver Street

Brass Key Guesthouse
As part of the Brass Key Guesthouse compound, 10 Carver Street is designated the Victorian House. But it could just as well be called the “Second Empire House,” since that’s the style in which it was built, probably around 1865. At the turn of the 20th century, it was the home of H. P. Hughes, who operated a staple and fancy dry goods store under his own name on the ground floor of King Hiram’s Lodge. For many years, this house or the abutter at 12 Carver Street were home to William Henry Young and his family. Like his next-door neighbor, Moses N. Gifford, Young was a man whose presence was felt in many fields; so many, in fact, it’s hard to know where to start.

12 Carver Street

Brass Key Guesthouse
Now designated the Gatehouse as part of the large and eclectic Brass Key Guesthouse compound, 12 Carver Street was built in the 1850s. William H. Young and his family lived here and next door, 10 Carver Street, where their lives are discussed more fully. The Rev. James F. Albion of the Universalist church lived here in the late 1920s. In the 1930s, Mrs. Fred H. Graham [?] held weekly duplicate bridge contests here, the results of which she would chronicle for The Advocate in a column called “Tops and Bottoms.” (This seems the perfect point on which not to comment.)

5 Center Street

Rose Acre

A path behind the Public Library leads to Rose Acre, a four-room guest house, run for women by women (Rosemarie A. Basile and Carol J. Noyes). The building was constructed around 1840. Capt. Loring A. Russell Sr., owner of the fishing vessel Loretta R., bought the house in 1952 and lived there several decades with his wife, Etta Robar Russell. “He owned the Provincetown Ice Company in his early years,” The Banner said in a 2004 obituary, “but his greatest love was the sea, and his proudest profession was that of fishing boat captain.”

7 Center Street

 
Heritage House

Heritage House is a four-bedroom bed-and-breakfast operated Lynn Mogell, an artist and Web designer, and her wife, Sarah K. Peake, who serves as the State Representative for the Fourth Barnstable district, comprising Provincetown, Chatham, Eastham, Harwich, Orleans, Truro and Wellfleet. True to its name, the house claims a considerable heritage, having been constructed in 1856 for Timothy Prosperous Johnson. Its large size was appropriate to the mission of sheltering 10 children. It was later the home of William Wilson Taylor, who personified — until his death in 1954 — Provincetown’s days as a whaling capital.

12 Center Street

 
Tucker Inn

Howard B. Burchman, who runs the Tucker Inn with his partner, Thomas Kinard, believes he may have been imprinted with the innkeeping gene. “I was conceived while my parents were running a small hotel in the Catskills,” he said. The distinctive mansard-roofed house, in the Second Empire style, is currently laid out with eight guest rooms. There is also a freestanding guest cottage. It was constructed in 1872. By 1910, it had become home to the Bowley family, which produced a decorated naval hero in Rear Admiral Clarence Matheson Bowley.

7 Central Street

Carriage House

Under three distinct proprietorships, 7 Central Street has served as a guest house for more than a half century. It is currently the luxury-minded Carriage House, with 13 rooms, run by David McFarlane, a Cypriot software executive, and Ken Hassett, an Irish designer. The opened the lodging in 2000. Before that, beginning in the 1980s, it had been Lady Jane’s Inn, owned and operated by Jane Antolini, who also served on the Board of Selectmen in the 1990s. She bought the property in 1976 from Mary A. Cabral, who had owned 7 Center Street since 1929 and had run it as a guest house for at least part of that time, in the mid-1950s.

1 Commercial Street

 
Provincetown Inn

Well worth a visit even if you’re not staying here, the sprawling Provincetown Inn Waterfront Resort and Conference Center — part of which stands on four acres of landfill created especially for the hotel — is so large that its parking lot alone could fit the Crown & Anchor and the Boatslip and the Land’s End Inn combined. The principal attraction are historical murals of Provincetown and Long Point, painted by Don Aikens from 1966 to 1972. But you shouldn’t miss the two-story interior court of the original inn, built 1923/25, or the outdoor swimming pool in the shape of a Pilgrim hat, tapering to the deep end, with symmetrical staircases on either side of the shallow end, where a brim ought to be.

10 Commercial Street

 
Delft Haven

This view up Commercial Street may be the most storybook tableau in town — a 20th-century fiction, of course, but wholly beguiling all the same. Ten Commercial Street is the other half of the Delft Haven cottage colony (see 7 Commercial Street), created around 1934 by Ralph S. Carpenter, who lived across the way at 11 Commercial Street. It was, in a modest way, a predecessor to more recent developments like Telegraph Hill; borrowing many aesthetic cues from the town but packaging them in an improbably immaculate — and isolated — setting.

15 Commercial Street

 
Red Inn

There are few hostelries in town as charming – and none as photogenic – as the Red Inn at 15 Commercial Street, which has been receiving guests for a century, and has operated under the current name since the 1910s. Sitting at a slight bend in the road, lushly planted, sharing a bit of its expansive water frontage with passers-by, it really resembles nothing so much as one of those pastel-tinted, linen-paper postcards of the early 20th century, come to life.

22 Commercial Street

 
Land’s End Inn

If the architecture of the Red Inn epitomizes the town’s genteel past, Land’s End Inn — owned and operated through 2012 by Michael MacIntyre — represents the wild and wonderfully woolly. Though it has the address of 22 Commercial Street, this Shingle-style, tchotchke-and-craftwork-stuffed polygonal hulk is actually perched crazily atop Gull Hill. Its builder, Charles Lothrop Higgins, was a Provincetown native, descended through his mother from Peregrine White, a Pilgrim. He has been described as a Boston haberdasher, a world traveler, a lecturer, a lifelong bachelor and — as is obvious from the Bungalow, the summer house he constructed on Gull Hill — something of a nonconformist.

28 Commercial Street

Westwinds Condominium

Formerly Westwinds on Gull Hill, a guest compound that included a cottage at 21 Point Street, and an outdoor pool. Roger Hanzes was the proprietor.

31-41 Commercial Street

 
Masthead Resort

From 31 to 41 Commercial Street are seven buildings on 450 feet of beachfront, collectively the Masthead Resort, owned and operated since 1959 by John J. Ciluzzi Sr. (b 1923) What seems at first like a completely random group can actually be discerned as a symmetrical compound of three substantial houses at the ends and center — No. 31, the Old Furniture Shop; No. 37, a Long Point floater; and No. 41, the Helena Rubinstein summer home — with two cottages in each of the two interstices.

44 Commercial Street

 
West End Inn

The West End Inn, an unusually large Greek Revival house at 44 Commercial Street, looks — appealingly — as if it’s almost all windows. According to the proprietors, it was built in the 1840s as a captain’s house. The historic district survey dates it at 1855. Embert Gibbs, a paper hanger and painter (of the utilitarian variety), lived here in the 1930s and 40s. His daughter Adelaide gave piano lessons, so the house must have been filled with music, even if occasionally off-key. Twenty years ago, the house was called the Bed ’n B’fast. It is now the seven-bedroom West End Inn. It describes itself as being owned and run by gay men, mostly for men.

45 Commercial Street

 
Jones Locker Condominium

For a period in the 1970s, when Provincetown was at its nonconformist zenith, a neo-Classical belfry, topped by a tapering cupola and whale windvane, stood outside (or very near) 45 Commercial Street. You can get a good glimpse of it inside the back cover of Provincetown Discovered (1986), by Edmund V. Gillon Jr. The remarkably out-of-place structure was also photographed in 1976 by Josephine Del Deo as part of the Massachusetts Historical Commission Inventory. Could it have been associated with the Shore Studio Gallery next door at 47 Commercial Street? I’m eager to learn more.

47 Commercial Street

 
Labrador Landing Condominium

The Labrador Landing Condominium at 47 Commercial Street occupies a large 1835 structure that distinguished for its dimensions early on: it was the only two-story house on Long Point, where it belonged to John Williams. In 1947, Donald F. Witherstine opened the Shore Studio Gallery. It was one of the first and most important commercial galleries in town. “We could use the amazing Mr. Witherstine in 57th Street also,” Edward Alden Jewell wrote in The New York Times that year. “He is a force, a whiz, a conflagration.”

49 Commercial Street

Twin Bays

The Twin Bays studio apartments at 49 Commercial Street is one of the most immaculately maintained houses in the West End. Passers-by in summertime can count on seeing its window boxes in profuse bloom. There are twin bay windows on the ground floor and unusual twin attic windows. Built around 1820, this was the home on Long Point of Prince Freeman. It was in the center of the settlement, on the shores of Lobster Plain. George S. Payne, an artist who depicted old wharves and fish houses in the late 19th century, once owned this house.

51 Commercial Street

Prince Freeman Apartments

Nathaniel Freeman lived in this modest house, built in 1818 in the center of the Long Point community. Catherine and Edward Dahill opened the Prince Freeman Apartments in 1949, taking the name from the first baby born at Long Point. Now called the Prince Freeman Westend Waterfront Compound, 51 Commercial Street continues to be run and owned by the Dahill family.

54 Commercial Street

 
Stephen Nickerson, who built this house on the shoreline around 1790, is thought to have been one of the wealthier residents of town. There was no Commercial Street at the time. The house simply faced the harbor. The 1807 House, as it was known until 2009, took its name from the year in which it was supposed that Nickerson moved the building upland to its current location at 54 Commercial Street, thereby creating space to service his whaling business.

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.”)

† 63 Commercial Street

 
The Viewpoint

According to Steve Silberman, whose family vacationed here for 40 years, “The original guest house bore the name the Galley, and then the Viewpoint, and was owned by the cookbook author Hazel Meyer and her partner Alice Bartoli, and then by Donald and Joan Morse, before being bought and torn down by the current owners.” In the 1950s, the Galley Shop was operated at this address by “Cap’ns” Dick Knudson and Jim Flag.

67 Commercial Street

Skiff Apartments

This was the property of Edward O. Weeks at the turn of the 20th century, when it was denominated 50 Commercial Street.

71 Commercial Street

 
Dinghy Dock

This small wharf was the property of Daniel Williams at the turn of the century, when it was denominated 54 Commercial Street.

73A Commercial Street

 
Captain Jack’s Wharf

No matter whether you’ve ever set foot here, the quirky, odd-angled, salt-crusted, sea-infused Captain Jack’s Wharf has almost undoubtedly helped form your mental picture of Provincetown. Even now, its eccentric and ramshackle charm seems largely intact, though a consultation with its asking rates will quickly dispel any idea that this is still a Bohemian paradise. Captain Jack — Jackson R. Williams — was born in Provincetown in 1861. He was a fisherman through the 1880s. He applied to the commonwealth in 1897 to build a 100-foot wharf from his property at 73½ Commercial Street. He later added 100 more feet. Then he began to cater to the tourist trade.

77 Commercial Street

77 Commercial Street

This was operated in the early 1950s as the Sandbar Grill, also known as the Sand Bar Lunch, under the proprietorship of Wesley and Mildred Felton. The building was renovated in 2000 and it is now run as a unit of BayShore-Chandler House.

88 Commercial Street

 
Valentine’s Guesthouse

For more than a century, since 1910, the Valentines have accommodated transient guests at the family home on Commercial Street — qualifying for some kind of record in hospitality. The Valentines’ story is also woven through that of the fishery, and — like so many families tied to the sea — they have known their share of great sorrow. In January 1941, Antone Francis Valentine (also known as Anthony), then around 60 years old, lost his life when the 90-foot trawler Mary E. O’Hara sank in Boston Harbor after hitting an anchored barge.

198 Commercial Street

Ranch Guest Lodge

Across the street from the Pied, a landmark of lesbian history, stands the Ranch, a 20-room gay landmark that is — happily — not much changed since it was opened in 1960 by Alton J. “Al” Stilson (1923-2010). Cheerfully rebuking buttoned-up, tasteful A-gaydom, the Ranch makes it clear that frisky guests are expected and welcome; beards, chaps and all. “The lusty vibe pervades the entire establishment,” OutTraveler said. Off the Ranch, Stilson may not be much remembered, but he played a very important role in 1977, when the Ranch was only one of three guest houses — the Coat of Arms and George’s Inn being the others — to participate in the first Carnival parade. A year later, the proprietors of those three houses formed the “founding nucleus” of the Provincetown Business Guild, Sandra L. Faiman-Silva wrote in The Courage to Connect: Sexuality, Citizenship and Community in Provincetown (University of Illinois Press, 2004).

247 Commercial Street

 
Crown & Anchor

On a summer’s night, the Crown & Anchor can’t be missed. In fact, it can’t be ignored. Not only is it one of P-town’s most prominent facades, with its grand columned portico and tower, but performers from the Cabaret — usually in drag — boisterously regale passers-by. The hotel business is a sideline; this is the town’s “largest entertainment complex,” true to its roots in the mid-19th century, when Timothy P. Johnson built the Central House (its first name) as a public hall for shows and entertainment, a bowling alley and — quite as important — a saloon.

296 Commercial Street

Lotus Guest House | Body Body

A two-and-a-half story shingled commercial structure, with a prominent polygonal corner turret, that was built around 1900 in Queen Anne style. This building would be best remembered by old-timers — real old-timers — as the Cutler Pharmacy. An early use of the word “gay” as a synonym for homosexual can be found in a 1951 anecdote told by “Bossy” McGady in his uninhibited newspaper column: “A ‘Gay Boy’ dashes into Cutler’s, in an awful tizzy, forgot the new eye brow pencil ‘it’ had just purchased.” (“Up Along and Down Along, The Advocate, 16 August 1951.) In the 1970s, this was a restaurant known as Mother Marion’s. It is currently the Lotus Guest House, owned and run by Jeff and Gurli Lovinger.

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.

300A Commercial Street

Secret Garden Inn

Known in the 1980s as the Gull Walk Inn, it is currently the Secret Garden Inn.

† 336 Commercial Street

 
Pilgrim House

The Pilgrim House did not accommodate the first visitors, for whom it was named. But it did open for business around 1810 and counted Henry David Thoreau among its guests. (Not an especially satisfied guest, as a page from his 1857 journal makes amusingly clear.) The original structure, set so far back from the street that there was room for a gazebo or bandstand in its front yard, might have dated to the late 1700s. Though much transformed, it managed to last until October 1990, when it was destroyed in a four-alarm blaze that required more than 100 firefighters from seven Cape towns to extinguish and injured more than a dozen people.

336 Commercial Street

 
Sage Inn and Lounge

After the disastrous fire of 1990, Donald R. Edwards, whose family founded and still owns the Governor Bradford, rebuilt the Pilgrim House. While it occupies roughly the same footprint, in its new incarnation, the property was more about entertainment than accommodation, though it did have 20 guest rooms.

350A Commercial Street

Captain’s House

The Captain’s House, tucked at the end of a narrow walkway off Commercial Street, is a bed-and-breakfast with 12 rooms. Until the 2012 season, under the owner Michael P. Stetto, it catered to gay men generally and to “bears” in particular — typically hirsute, heavier set men whose appearance and demeanor is consciously the opposite of the hairless, lithe gay archetype. The new owners are Peter C. Bullis and Mauricio J. Zuleta. “It no longer caters to just bears and gay men, but it’s for everyone,” Bullis told me in August 2012. “The name will stay the same.” ¶ Updated 2012-08-21

353A-353B Commercial Street

Angels’ Landing (West buildings) | Café Dinara

Three buildings spill down to the waterfront from behind 353 Commercial Street. There is a little commercial unit on the square that has seen one coffee shop open after another in recent years. In this picture, taken in 2008, it was Cicchetti’s Espresso Bar, proferring “coffees and tiny nibbles.” That didn’t last long. By 2010, it was Mayorga’s Coffee Shop. Also gone. As of 2011, it was the Café Dinara.

353-355 Commercial Street

 
Angels’ Landing (East buildings) | Birdie Silkscreen Studio | ScottCakes | Box Lunch

The Angela of Angel’s Landing was no angel — certainly not in the eyes of America’s photojournalists or its political left wing. She was Angela Calomiris (1916-1995), the daughter of Greek immigrants and a member of the celebrated Photo League in New York City. On 26 April 1949, she stunned her colleagues when she appeared at the trial of 11 Communists accused of plotting to overthrow the government and disclosed that she’d been an undercover agent of the F.B.I. since 1942.

368 Commercial Street

Gallery Inn | Yates & Kennedy | Maison Home Décor

The main building on this lot, which is also known as 3 Johnson Street, currently serves as the Gallery Inn, with three efficiency apartments. It is operated by Lenore Luttinger, who also owns the building. More apparent to passersby is the one-story commercial extension that was built after the 1940s into what was once a large side yard between Johnson and Arch Streets.

378 Commercial Street

 
Somerset House Inn

Stephen Cook (1817-1888), whose house this was — that’s his fourth wife, the former Jennifer E. Churchill, at left — was a significant figure in the development of Provincetown and especially of this neighborhood, where he possessed not only this conspicuous dwelling but storehouses across the road and, beyond them, a wharf at what is now 381 Commercial Street. This business was passed on to his nephew, George O. Knowles (b 1842), whose mother, Delia (1821-1898), was Stephen Cook’s sister. Cook was a longtime officer of the First National Bank and served as its president for the last 11 years of his life, at which time the bank’s stock was trading at its highest price ever.

381-383 Commercial Street

 
Bull Ring Wharf | Kidstuff

Above the storefront, the wonderfully plain facade of No. 381 attests to its utilitarian origins as a store house at the foot of the George O. Knowles Wharf property. The original wharf, then owned by the Higgins Lumber Company, was destroyed in 1926 when the Coast Guard cutter USCG Morrill drifted amok during a powerful storm. Higgins continued to own the property until 1948, when it was purchased by Thomas A. “Tommy” Francis and his wife, Deola. They ran it as the Bull Ring Apartments, succeeded in 1962 Munroe G. Moore and his wife, Mary.

384 Commercial Street

384 House | Esmond-Wright Gallery

This striking double-bay house, which can easily be picked out of photographs taken of the near East End wharves at the turn of the century, has accommodated visitors for more than a half century. Capt. Arthur Duarte (±1902-2002) and his wife, Mary (Flores) Duarte, ran it in the 1950s and early 60s as the Casa Dominho, which was perhaps a contraction of the name of Domingos Godinho, who once lived here. Duarte, a native of Lisbon, was the owner and captain of several fishing vessels from the 1930s through the 1960s, including the Serafina (sometimes spelled Seraphina), the Yankee, and the Skipper. He lived to be 100.

386 Commercial Street

 
Waterford Inn – Café – Tavern

“Captain Lavender’s Deck” at the Waterford is not some sort of coy code to entice gay patrons. No, this property once was home to Captain Lavender — in fact, the Captains Lavender: Robert M. Lavender (1847-1928) and Stephen S. Lavender (1852-1910), who appears to have been Robert’s younger uncle. (Stephen’s much older brother, Capt. Joseph A. Lavender, was Robert’s father. Joseph was lost at sea in 1870.) The family came from Nova Scotia, as did Robert’s wife, Louisa J. (1847-1920), herself a remarkable woman.

392 Commercial Street

Waterford Inn – Café – Tavern

Technically, 392 Commercial Street doesn’t exist any longer. It’s part of a unified parcel with 386 Commercial Street. But it is such a distinctively individual building — as it was originally — that it gets its own entry; at least enough of one to note that it served as an adjunct to the Gray Inn, run from 1931 to 1946 by David L. Allen, then after 1946 by Jere Snader. It has also played an annex role for the successors to Gray, including the Ocean’s Inn, the Commons and the Waterford. Other commercial tenants included Polly’s Powder Puff in the late 1930s.

394 Commercial Street

White Caps Rooms and Apartments

In the first half of the 20th century, when there were few women doctors to be found anywhere in America, Provincetown had at least three — surely a great many more per capita than almost any settlement in the country. Dr. J. M. Winslow, an osteopathic physician, had her office here in the early 1930s.

Jessica and Joseph Lema Jr. lived here as newlyweds until they moved in 1939 to 10 Cudworth Street, where Mrs. Lema was still living more than 70 years later. A store called Tribal Offerings was here in the early 2000s, followed in 2003 by the Backshore Gallery, founded and run by Peter Clemons and Marianne Benson.

401 Commercial Street

 
Lucy Cross House (Casa Lucia da Cruz)

Early in the new year of 1919, Aylmer and Katie Small sold this house to Primo and Lucia da Cruz (Lucy Cross). It has been in the family ever since. Their daughter, Maria da Cruz (Mary Cross), married Preston Grant “Pat” Hall. The couple lived at 396 Commercial Street; operated the Souvenir Shop at 286 Commercial; the Gift Box at 397 Commercial; and, also at 397 Commercial, Pat’s Happy Parking and the Cinnamon Sands cottage.

425 Commercial Street

Aerie House and Beach Club

This is the beach club portion of the Aerie House and Beach Club at 184 Bradford Street.

452 Commercial Street

 
Tall Ship Apartments

Originally the Capt. William Bush house and once known as the Ship Apartments or Tall Ship Apartments, this building has changed astonishingly little in 35 years, as two pictures below (one taken by Josephine Del Deo in 1977) clearly show. Manuel F. “Pat” Patrick and Hilda Patrick owned the Ship Apartments in the 1940s and ’50s, when the best-known resident was Francis J. “Bossy” McGady (±1897-1952), whose “Up Along and Down Along” column in The Advocate conjured every week the voice of an Irishman who had grown up as the child of an innkeeper in Worcester, played football as a tramp athlete for any number of colleges he didn’t attend,

490 Commercial Street

 
BayShore No. 20 (Iota)

In English, jot is derived from iota — meaning the smallest bit. In Provincetown, Iota is derived from Jot — meaning Jonathan C.”Jot” Small (±1876-1952), boatbuilder extraordinaire, Arctic traveler and, for a time in the 1930s, proprietor of a restaurant called Jot’s Galley here at 490 Commercial. The cottage served a commercial purpose before and after Small’s tenure, as Flora Winslow DeLaurier’s Bob Shoppe, a hair salon, in the 1920s and as Manuel F. Patrick’s Iota Package Store (read: liquor) in the 1940s.

493 Commercial Street

BayShore (West)

There were giants in town. Dr. Frederick S. Hammett (±1886-1953) was among them. Internationally known for his research in cellular growth — research aimed specifically at finding the possible causes and, by extension, the cure for cancer — Hammett was also a devoted Beachcomber, known for his remarkable outfits in the annual costume balls, and at one time the president of the Provincetown Art Association. This was his home. It was also home a decade later to Harold Goodstein. He commissioned the architect Donald Jasinski, designer of the remarkable Farfalla cottage at 236R Bradford Street (otherwise known as the “Mushroom House”), to renovate the building. The project won the admiring attention of House Beautiful magazine in 1967, especially for the staircase in the double-height living room, leading up to a loft bedroom.

495 Commercial Street

 
BayShore (East)

Though the BayShore’s courtyard is private, an arched breezeway between 495 Commercial and 493 Commercial offers anyone who walks by a spectacularly framed glimpse of the harbor. Intended as such or not, it is a welcome little civic gesture, since the impulse to wall off the waterfront for private enjoyment runs strong. Then again, there has always been a strong upland-to-shoreline connection at this property, since it was once Brown’s Bathing Beach. (See 497 Commercial.) And this was Mary Brown’s rooming house. It is now managed by Ann Maguire and Harriet Gordon as part of a multi-unit complex that includes 493 Commercial, 490 Commercial, 481 Commercial and 77 Commercial.