The West End
ALTHOUGH IT IS now a semiorderly concentration of shops and houses, Provincetown was once so thoroughly devoted to the sea and what it yields as to seem as much a manifestation of the water as a human settlement. During its first hundred years, until the early 1800s, it was not really divided up into streets per se; it was simply a gathering of houses and shops, built on whatever patch of sand their builders selected. Gutted cod for salt cod, one of Provincetown’s most profitable early exports, lay drying on the sand before most of the houses, and cod hung drying from the trees as well. By way of ornamentation, most of the houses offered whale ribs and vertebrae in the stretches of sand where their gardens would have been.
Soil came to Provincetown by way of ships that sailed there from Europe and South America, to load up on salt cod. They carried earth in their holds for ballast, which local citizens were glad to purchase, to spread around their houses for gardens. The ships’ crews refilled their holds with rocks for their return trips. This practice was outlawed as Provincetown became so denuded of rocks that the tides began to encroach upon the houses, but by then the selling of dirt had become a profitable sideline among the crews of the foreign ships. They continued selling earth to the people of Provincetown and stole rocks from the beaches at night.
Provincetown has always divided itself into West End and East End. On this walk start at the West End and work your way east. The West End was traditionally, literally, the wrong side of the tracks. When Provincetown had become a significant whaling port, in the mid-and late 1800s, the most prosperous town in the state of Massachusetts, railroad tracks ran along the Cape right out onto MacMillan Wharf, in the middle of town, so trains could load whale oil, bone, and baleen directly into boxcars. (The trains are by now long gone.) The whaling crews and fishermen, the laborers and clerks and servants, many of them Portuguese, all lived west of the railroad tracks. The wealthy—the whaling captains and merchants, the summer people from Boston and New York—all lived to the east. Most of the gentry never went west of the tracks. It was considered dangerous, and an upstanding member of society seen venturing in that direction could only be after something unseemly.
A version of the old division—reputable versus disreputable—remains, though it no longer has as much to do with economics. Compared to the East End, the West End is younger, sexier, and a bit more prone to noise at night though not, by any urban standards, very noisy at all. It is more gay. The beach where men go to have sex after the bars close is on the West End.
The West End, though every bit as densely inhabited as the East End, is slightly rougher and more random. The houses are more various, since the neighborhood’s history is not as genteel or orderly. You could say that the West End is more American, for better and for worse; it is a bit like West Egg in The Great Gatsby, where Jay Gatsby lived; where the newly rich and the newly arrived squeeze their private, personal monuments in among the prim cottages that came over from Long Point 150 years ago. The East End, like East Egg, where Daisy Buchanan lived, is more Cape Cod, more in love with tradition, more likely to house people whose families have owned their shingled, dormered residences for fifty or a hundred years.
JOHN’S HOUSE
On the West End of Commercial Street is my favorite Provincetown house, the home of my friend John Dowd. John’s house stands at the bend in Commercial Street that resulted when, in the mid-1800s, a particularly stubborn citizen refused to move his salt works to accommodate the laying out of the street (which was then called Front Street, as Bradford was sensibly called Back Street).
John is a landscape painter. When he bought his house ten years ago, it was one of the eyesores of town, though the term eyesore probably implies a grander awfulness than this house actually possessed. It was simply as devoid of character or charm as a house can be: an old rambling building wrapped in aluminum siding, with a faded asphalt roof. If it were a person, it would have been a server in a high school cafeteria or an attendant at the sort of nursing home you hope never to have to go to; someone stolid and blank, of questionable competence, whose uniform is not quite clean and whose manner suggests a state of exhausted boredom so extreme that an emotion as deep as despair would be a relief.
No one I know thought it was a good idea for John to buy this place, even though the price was low (as, we all felt, it well should have been). Everyone I know is astonished at the house John was able to find under all that aluminum and asphalt, that general air of quiet hopelessness. It turns out that aluminum siding peels off, as John put it, “like foil off a baked potato,” and in this case had actually helped preserve the old wood siding beneath. He replaced the aluminum-frame windows, the sort you find in cheap condos, with six-over-sixes he scavenged from flea markets and demolitions and managed to fill them with panes of the imperfect, slightly wavy glass they would have held when they were new. He put up shutters (also old scavenged ones, from the period when the house was built), replaced the roof, and added a back porch.
As a renovator, John’s true gift lies in his respect for the process of decay. Provincetown is full of “restored” houses that, with every good intention on the part of their owners, have been rendered so pristine, they might be part of a Cape Cod village section in Epcot Center. John’s aesthetic runs more toward the Miss Havisham, and his house is not only lovely but looks as if it has been standing there, more or less unaltered, for at least a hundred years.
Usually in summer someone is staying there, in one of the upstairs bedrooms with an old brass bed and a dormer window. Often more than one or two people are staying there. It is a bit like I imagine English country houses to have been during the days of Jane Austen—a sort of ongoing semiparty with guests who come and go, read books in the garden or cook some dish they’re renowned for, gather at dinnertime, and then disperse again. One guest, an erudite man and a considerable cook, somehow extended his visit to just under four years.
The house has a well-used music room with a player piano and a big closet devoted entirely to costumes. It is possible, at John’s house, to arrive in your street clothes and emerge as a sultan, a Confederate soldier, or a ballerina with feathered wings. The archway that leads from his reading room to the living room has been fitted out with heavy velvet curtains that facilitate the occasional parlor game, play, or evening of tableaux vivants.
If you happen to be in Provincetown on the Fourth of July, you will find a group of us installed on John’s front porch, under the enormous, tattered American flag he hangs every July over his front door, with only forty-five stars on it. It is one of our traditions. We have a grill and a good supply of hot dogs—anyone who wants one is welcome to a hot dog and a glass of whatever we’re serving, if you eat such things and care to linger awhile. We play instruments, very badly, and only until the irritable man three doors down calls the police and makes us stop, though if you arrive before the police do, we’d love for you to take a turn on the drum, saxophone, tambourine, or kazoo. It doesn’t matter if you can’t play. None of us can.
In one of the upstairs windows, the one that looks right up Commercial Street, John has placed a chalky old marble bust of Shakespeare, looking out. You can see it especially well late at night, when everyone has finally gone to bed and Shakespeare shines palely in the dark window, like a little moon.