1 Commercial Street, the Provincetown Inn (1930s), courtesy of the Provincetown Inn.
The Provincetown Inn Waterfront Resort and Conference Center is so large that its parking lot could hold the Crown & Anchor, Boatslip and Land’s End Inn — combined. The developer was Joshua Paine, who built the Castle at 2 Commercial and the Cape Cod, Colonial, and Puritan cold storage plants. The original building, with its two-story atrium (pictured), opened in 1925. During the 1930s, it was briefly the Sippican Hotel. It was taken over in 1935 by the dynamic Chester Peck Jr., who enlarged the inn beyond recognition after World War II, when it was used as a Coast Guard training center. In 1946, Peck opened the 255-seat Breakwater Room, with murals by Charles Heinz. Then he had the audacity to propose a four-acre offshore landfill. Beginning in 1957, a new peninsula was created for a parking lot, a motel extension, a pool in the shape of a Pilgrim hat (pictured), and, in 1967, a recreation and entertainment pavilion designed by Burnett Vickers. (Grace Jones and Phyllis Diller performed there — not on the same bill — as did Wayland Flowers and his puppet Madame.)
Mural by Don Aikens (ca 1966), 1 Commercial Street, by David W. Dunlap (2009).
Swimming pool (not yet cleaned for the summer), 1 Commercial Street, by David W. Dunlap (2010).
A redecoration begun in 1966 yielded charming murals by Don Aikens, based on old postcards and vintage photos. The most ambitious suite, in the Tiffany Room, recreates the Long Point settlement. Aikens also created “three-dimensional murals” with elements like a sawed-apart boat hull (pictured) to give them actual depth. Peck sold the business in 1972 to a group of investors from whom Brooke Evans emerged as the owner in 1977. The pavilion was demolished in 1997. The Evans family still runs the inn. Evan, Brooke’s son, is the hotel manager and president of the Provincetown Inn Cooperative.
More than 2,000 buildings and vessels are searchable on buildingprovincetown.com. The Building Provincetown book is available for purchase ($20) at Town Hall, Office of the Town Clerk, 260 Commercial Street, Provincetown 02657.
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. 
Red House
Red House, the plaque says – a bit needlessly, since the house is clearly that. A white-on-blue enamel plaque, designed by Claude Jensen, shows a Cape Cod house on a scow on the waves, with the narrow stretch of Long Point and its lighthouse in the distance. That indicates a house that was floated across the harbor from the antebellum settlement on the point. Once called the Gilbert Spencer cottage, 18 Commercial Street was built around 1830. It seems to have acquired its distinctive color in the 1930s, when it was acquired as an annex by the Red Inn, across the road at 
Beach Box
Before it was floated over, the 1850s Frances Abbott Cottage stood at the western edge of Long Point. The fluted pilasters and entablature identify this house as vernacular Greek Revival. It was the home to the Joneses in the mid-20th century: Carolyn, who helped organize the Camp Fire Girls, and her daughter, Helen, who was active in the Nautilus Club.
Westwinds Condominium
This was the summer home and studio of 
A meticulously cared-for house, 34 Commercial Street is part of the Long Point diaspora in the West End. It was constructed in about 1830 and was the residence of Joseph Emery, in the center of the original settlement out at the point. In the mid-1950s, Jane Harrison had a jewelry store here, selling enamel-on-copper earrings, bracelets, rings, pendants and pins.
Ina (Small) Snow (b ±1885) was — if such a distinction can be imagined — the Beach Plum Queen of the Lower Cape. She was an energetic, indefatigable and outspoken advocate of the domestic cultivation of the wild beach plum, seeking to tame and industrialize it as an economically beneficial crop, elevating it from its status as a local curiosity available only at roadside stands. So this handsome house — now home to Lauren Richmond and Bruce Deely — was, for a time in the 1940s and 1950s, Beach Plum Central. The house was constructed around 1840, the 
Lawrence “Larry” Richmond (±1910-1978) does not have the household name of Helena Rubinstein (1870-1965), from whom he bought this property in 1945. But in his day, Richmond was every bit the influential tastemaker, as the head of Music Dealers Service in New York, distributors of pop sheet music — a backbone of the industry through the mid-20th century, when sales of sheet music from racks in department stores, stationers and barber shops simply plummeted. When 40 Commercial Street was built, in the late 18th or early 19th century (the 
The eccentricity of 42 Commercial Street, built around 1890, as well as the fact that it hasn’t yet been restored to within an inch of its life, makes it especially appealing. Until his death in 1941, this was the home of John C. Weeks Jr., born on Long Point in 1853. He was a whaler in his youth and, in retirement, earned renown as a model ship builder. (His wife, Carrie, made the sails.) Weeks’s miniature of the clipper Rainbow was owned by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Helena Rubinstein (d 1965), one of the richest women in the world, bought this house in 1942 and kept it until 1947, even after disposing of 40 and 41 Commercial Street.
Jones Locker Condominium
A full Cape with Victorian trim, 46 Commercial Street was originally the home of Richard Tarrant at the east end of 
Known as the Renaissance Apartments in the 1980s. It was formerly owned by Raffaello LaMantia, an artist, and 
Building Provincetown 