53 Bradford Street

At the Race Run Sporting Center, housed in this modest structure (c1940), “you could rent a bike, fix a flat, buy a hook and the bait to put on it, as well as get advice on where the bass and blues were running on any given day,” Susan Leonard said. The proprietors were Joseph Smith and his wife, Marilyn Smith. More recently, before moving to the old Eastern School, ArtStrand was here.

211½ Bradford Street

Mildred Greensfelder Playground

The forlorn sign doesn’t begin to hint at the pioneering influence of Mildred (Wood) Greensfelder, who was the leading force in the 1940s and the 1950s for the creation, maintenance and vitalization of the town’s principal playgrounds; here, on Howland Street, and in the West End, at Nickerson Street. Such was Mrs. Greensfelder’s identification with the issue of playgrounds that Mary Hackett proposed in 1954 that the new elementary school be named in her honor, “as her constancy and perseverance has resulted in a real contribution to the health and happiness of our children.” (“Name for School,” The Advocate, Nov. 18, 1954.)

Naturally — this being Provincetown — not even the subject of playgrounds is pure mom-and-apple-pie. Mrs. Greensfelder found herself in a nasty battle with the Recreation Commission, of all bodies. The donnybrook involved included her resignation from the committee and then a legal struggle that went to court and before the voters. The issue seems to have boiled down to how much macadam should be in a playground and who had the authority to install — if Mrs. Greensfelder didn’t aprrove. And she did not approve. “It is my firm belief,” she declared in 1950, “that such a surface, even when constantly supervised, will be hazardous, and wounds received from falls on macadam can be dangerous and dirty, and bones and skulls can be broken.” (“Pioneer Worker Quits in Protest,” The Advocate, May 25, 1950.)

Even when she and her husband, the playwright Elmer L. Greensfelder, moved to Philadelphia, Mrs. Greensfelder continued to hold a strong interest in the welfare of the playgrounds. In absentia, she urged voters before the Town Meeting of 1956 to approve the money necessary for the removal of dirty sand and the “spreading of clean sand in both playgrounds.”

† CCNS Herring Cove | First Bath House

Herring Cove Bath House

In 1953, the Herring Cove Bath House opened, an event consequential enough to draw Governor Christian A. Herter. Designed by Mario Caputo of Boston, the state-built bath house was a handsome-enough modernist structure with a glass-block facade. It could have passed for a small-town airport terminal.

CCNS Herring Cove | Second Bath House

 
Seen from across Herring Cove, the National Park Service’s new Herring Cove bath house pavilions, which opened in 2013, seem almost to be levitating over the beach. Well, indeed they are. Several feet. The entire complex is on pilings, allowing surge waves to pass underneath, as well as to allow the entire complex to be moved farther upland if necessary. That is one of several attractions designed into the $5 million project by its architect and project manager, Amy Sebring, of the park service’s design and construction division.

CCNS Herring Cove | New Beach

 

There are few beaches along the Atlantic from which you can watch the sun set. Herring Cove Beach (formerly New Beach) is one of them. In the 19th century, much of the upland area of the modern-day beach lay under the waters of Lancy’s Harbor. Nearby was a small settlement of fishermen’s huts, called Herring Cove.

83 Commercial Street

 
West End Racing Club
The West End Racing Club sounds like a place whose members dress in commodores’ outfits, but it is in fact a nonprofit organization begun at Flyer’s Beach in 1950 that teaches children to swim and sail. Their shoreline clubhouse at 83 Commercial Street was finished and dedicated in 1957 on “the same ground where once stood the old Wharf Theater.” This building was to house summer activities and provide a wintertime storage area for the boats.

† 497 Commercial Street

 
Brown’s Bathing Beach

“By the freezer, by the freezer, by the beautiful freezer. You and me, sir; you and me, sir; oh, how happy we’ll be, sir.” These aren’t real lyrics but they certainly would have applied to Brown’s Bathing Beach, a popular East End recreation spot around the turn of the 20th century. Unless one remembers that the waterfront was first and foremost an industrial precinct, it may be hard to understand why people would have gone bathing just a few wards from the Consolidated Weir Company’s enormous cold storage plant — as if they had anywhere to go that wasn’t cheek-by-jowl with some freezer plant or active wharf.

25 Winslow Street

 
Manuel V. Motta Athletic Field

Entry to be written.