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June 18, 2008

Gentrified Provincetown

Pre-Gentrified Provincetown

If you drive to the tippy end of Cape Cod, your last stop before Greenland is Provincetown, one of the most storied, historic and truly bizarre towns in the US. The Pilgrims landed first in Provincetown (second at Corn Hill in Truro, less than 1/2 mile from my house, where they stole the corn the Indans had left there). They and their descendants proceeded to very quickly denude the Cape of all of its trees, which they burned for fuel and to boil salt from the seawater. After that, they proceeded to do the same to pretty much the rest of the whole country.

Spank the Monkey -iconic tourist P-Town

Anyway, for a couple of hundred years, fishing was the main economic activity in P-Town, mostly done by Portugese immigrants, who still make up the backbone of the family life in town, although the fishing fleet is a tiny fragment of its former glory. In the 20th century, art became important in P-Town, as the Cape Cod School of Art was founded early in the century, training hundred of primarily landscape artists. Beginning shortly after WW II, Hans Hoffman taught and inspired a generation of abstract expressionists at his fabled summer classes. Artists who spent significant periods of time in P-Town include Marsden Hartley, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Willem DeKooning, More about that later, when I talk about the Fine Arts Work Center.

Provincetown today is a crazy, welcoming, lively mishmash - a gay mecca, an artists' hangout, a tourist trap - surrounded by some of the most amazing scenery on the continent.

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