Yes, Provincetown is a small town. On a really hot summer day, as many as 60,000 people flood the beaches, dunes, and streets, but its year-round population is under 3,700. Getting there is arduous but it’s hard to get lost. Cross the bridge onto Cape Cod and drive Route 6 until it ends!
Provincetown is a resort town, but one with a difference. It is (per capita) the gayest place in America (163/1000) and that doesn’t count LGBTQ visitors. P-town, as it’s often called, has been gay since the late 1970s.
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| Boys will be girls |
You can certainly have a good time there if you’re straight; it’s a live-and-let-live place. You’ll encounter men in drag, same sex couples canoodling, gay-themed shows, and look-at-me flamboyance. This is especially true of the younger set. Longtime residents and business owners, gay and straight, have folded themselves into civic life and businesses and welcome everyone. But if you’re not okay with gay people, don’t go there; you’d be like a vegan complaining there’s nothing on the steakhouse menu to eat.
P-town is an American story. It’s not what it was because towns either adapt or decline. It was the first place Pilgrims made landfall after getting lost on their way to Virginia, a fortuitous mistake as the Pilgrims thrived when Jamestown starved. The Mayflower Compact is thought to have been penned on the site. Alas, the Compact didn’t apply to Algonquian natives.
By the 1800s, though, the Pilgrim past was gone; P-town had become a fishing and whaling center whose English population gave way to Azorean Portuguese immigrants. Like many fishing villages, it was a grimy, smelly place dominated by small unpainted homes, some shingle-style, others just bare clapboards–small because the winters were long and the winds off the Atlantic can be fierce. (They certainly were one of the May days we were there.) Fishing boats and piers remain in evidence, but the industry has declined, along with its Portuguese population. Because of P-town’s proximity to Boston, those of Irish ancestry now outnumber Portuguese by nearly 2:1.
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| I didn't say all the art was conventional |
Artists and thespians altered Provincetown in the first half of the 20th century and the town remains famous for galleries and summer stock theater. Its once-thriving art colonies are now more individualized than collective, but painters, photographers, and sculptors abide.
You will see plenty of visible wealth in today’s P-town, but it was down-market during the late 1950s into the 1960s. The counterculture landed there in the ‘60s and ‘70s because it was cheap! Peek into a realtor’s window and you’ll know those days are gone. You will also need to search hard for reasonably priced dining or lodging, major reasons why many Bay Staters stay elsewhere when they visit Cape Cod.Yet, Provincetown is also an American story in that it has a lot of invisible poverty. Its yearly per capita income is $4k less than the Massachusetts mean. Some is due to being dominated by service industries, but its poverty rate of 15.4 percent is about 1/3 higher than the rest of Massachusetts.
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| Foggy lower Commercial Street 6:30 am |
Commercial Street is the heart of the tourist town. The lower part is filled with shops, restaurants, and motels and you can easily wile away a day wending your way along it. There is a lovely public library, an intriguing art museum, a handsome town hall, and some relatively cheap eats at the part of MacMillian Pier closest to Commercial Street. Nearby is a wonderful Portuguese bakery where you will be tempted to order everything. (I’m partial to the custard pastry that’s Portugal’s most famous, pasteis de nata.) Nor can you miss it; it’s called Provincetown Portuguese Bakery!
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Inside the town limits the Pilgrim Monument is the prominent tourist destination, though you need not shell out $18 for a panoramic ocean view you can see elsewhere. I’d also avoid the Lobster Pot as well. It looks unpretentious, but it’s $20 appetizers and a $42 hunk of halibut. Why? Because Anthony Bourdain started there. Bah! That was 50 years ago. Ciro & Sal’s is a cozy Italian place further up Commercial (4 Kiley Court) and is reasonably priced.
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| Race Point |
The National Park Service’s Cape Cod National Seashore entrance is just outside the town limits. Make sure to travel down to Race Point for its desolate setting and wild surf, though swim somewhere safer, like Herring Cove. (Actually, who wants to swim in the icy Atlantic?) There are great bike paths in the National Seashore, but take your time as your calves will be bawling on the uphill dune trails. Birders love the area as well.
Still, I doubt we’ll be back in P-town soon. It’s simply too bloody long to get there from Western Mass and we didn’t go when Route 6 gets packed. It’s far easier to hit the Southern Maine coast, so we’ll cede the Cape to Bostonians and hang with the crunchier Mainers.
Rob Weir
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