Whatever your preconception is of Provincetown, Mass., it is almost surely incomplete. The tiny town of 3,000 permanent residents, situated at the very tip of Cape Cod, swells to 60,000 between June and August and harbors a wide variety of experiences for a curious traveler.

Race Point Lighthouse in Provincetown dates to 1816 and remains illuminated and in use. (Photo by Paul Scharff)

Figureheads from the bows of sailing ships are a common sight. This one on the porch of a home on Commerce Street, dates to 1867, but its provenace is unknown. (Photo by Barbara Winnerman)

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Provincetown’s residential neighborhoods feature homes once occupied by famous writers and artists. (Photo by Barbara Winnerman)

The Grozier House was built by a sea captain with a tower so his wife could see the arrival of his ship. (Photo by Barbara Winnerman)

The Lobster Pot on Commercial Street in Provincetown, Mass., is a local favorite and has been serving fresh seafood for 40 years. (Photo by Barbara Winnerman)



A replica of the schooner Rose Dorothea occupies the reading room of the town library in Provincetown, Mass. (Photo by Barbara Winnerman)

A statue in front of the town library in Provincetown, Mass., is named “Tourists.” (Photo by Barbara Winnerman)

Ocean-front shacks erected on the dunes beginning in the 1920s are now National Park Service properties available for rent based on a lotery drawing. (Photo by Barbara Winnerman)

Arts Dune Tours explore the dunes on hour-long journeys into the sand. (Photo by Barbara Winnerman)

The Provincetown Monument commemorates the landing of the Mayflower in 1620. (Photo by Barbara Winnerman)



Al fresco diners can watch the steady parade of pedestrians, bicyclists and skateboarders on Commercial Street in Provincetown, Mass. (Photo by Paul Scharff)

The east end of town is the surprise location of the first artist colony in the United States, and continues to be home to numerous galleries featuring mostly local artists. The creative people began arriving in the late 1800s, lured by the remoteness, stark beauty and colors of the seaside landscape featuring thousands of acres of white dunes speckled with scrub oak bent by the wind, green seagrasses and the natural cranberry bogs that exist where the aquifer pierces the sand.

The 60-plus art galleries are concentrated along the east end of Commercial Street where it is not unusual to find a gallery at street level, another on the second floor, and a third in the basement, all in the same 1900-era building. Look carefully and there might be another down the alley.

On the west side of Provincetown, at the opposite end of Commercial Street, is a residential area featuring a remarkable parade of residences. The history of the homes and their most notable occupants are amply described in a free Historic Provincetown Walking Tour brochure.

Beside legendary occupants such as Norman Mailer and Eugene O’Neill, as well as a profusion of sea captains and explorers, several are identified as “floaters” by a white-on-blue plaque depicting a house aboard a scow on the sea. Beginning in 1818 each home had been built on a spit of land several miles offshore surrounded by water teeming with fish, and occupied by fishermen and their families. As the fishing grounds depleted by the late 1860s, 40 of the homes were salvaged and “floated” into town where they remain firmly attached to the soil.

At the western end of Commercial Street is a very small park in the middle of a roundabout commemorating the spot where the Mayflower landed in 1620 with approximately 120 passengers and crew before sailing on a few weeks later to the much better-known second landing at Plymouth Rock.

To commemorate the “first” landing of the Mayflower, a 252 foot-granite monument was erected in 1910 on a hill overlooking Provincetown. To say it dominates the skyline in a community where few buildings are more than 30 feet high is an understatement. Modeled as a replica of the 14th century Torre di Mangia in Siena, Italy, the slim tower functions as an “exclamation point” at the tip of the Cape, ensuring people remember this is where the settling of America actually commenced. In fact, the Mayflower Compact, a set of rules for self-governance in America, was conceived here in the Provincetown harbor.

Sandwiched between the art galleries and the residential homes, Commercial Street becomes a plethora of unique shops and restaurants housed in buildings dating to the late 1880s, many backing up to Provincetown harbor. While there are tourist fudge and souvenir shops, many of the stores are one-of-a-kind. For example, The Marine Specialties Store is identified by a bin of colorfully painted buoys on the street, followed by a bin of $5 tee shirts with a sign they are $2 if you “find a hole in one.”

Browsing further on into the depths of the one-person-width aisles the store becomes a costume shop before morphing into a cuckoo selection of merchandise from authentic, historically significant swords, to Ruth Bader Ginsberg hand puppets in a rack with Tibetan prayer flags made in Nepal. Look up, and a suspended museum of nautical antiques dangles from the ceiling.

Few tourists visit the town library on Commercial Street, thus missing one of the most unusual reading rooms found in any library in the world. On the second floor, surrounded by bookcases, a 66-foot long (but still a half scale) replica of the 1905 schooner Rose Dorothea pierces the walls, while the mast goes up through the ceiling and into the steeple of what used to be a church in 1860. Instead of a ship-in-a-bottle, this is a-ship-in-a-library!

The commercial section of Commercial Street might also be the premier “people watching” spot in America, made all the more enjoyable by many restaurants featuring street-side, under-the-umbrella tables, and a village that prides itself on being a community where everyone is welcomed and accepted “as they are.” Rainbow flags and banners compete with American flags, families with kids on a father’s shoulders, and men and women with “colorful art in their hair” are as abundant as the shirtless bicycle riders and Pedi cabs that ramble down in the opposite direction of automobiles traveling the narrow (supposedly) one-way street.

Another distinctive section of Provincetown, (or “P-Town” as it is often called) features thousands of acres of sand dunes that surround the beach community and make up the Cape Cod National Seashore, now protected from development. It is the domain of Art’s Dune Tours, which has been offering hour-long trips into the acres of sand for over 70 years. Guides present information about the flora and fauna and a history of the dunes, while traveling over the undulating mounds of sand in four-wheel drive SUVs.

The tours also pass near some of the ocean-front shacks that were erected on the dunes beginning in the 1920s. Reportedly using the flotsam of washed up shipwrecks, the flimsy but still standing abodes were an appealing oasis to many artists and writers who were attracted to the solitude they found inspiring while writing or painting. Eugene O’Neill, Jack Kerouac, e.e. cummings, Norman Mailer, and Jackson Pollock have all resided in the shacks.

There are 19 dune shacks remaining in what is now a historic district, and 18 are owned by the National Park Service, while one is still privately owned. Today anyone is welcome to enter a lottery for an opportunity to reside for a week in one of the dwellings, which “feature” no electricity, running water, or plumbing.

For the adventurous, there is no lack of water-based options in Provincetown. Seal and whale watching tours leave from MacMillan Pier at the center of town. Kayaks and paddle boards can be rented, and guests are welcomed aboard the 1925 schooner Hindu and the Bay Lady II for daily sailings in the harbor. Powerboats and sailboats can be rented, and many yachts at the town marina offer deep-sea fishing.

Nighttime ghost tours have no end of scary stories to relate with an inventory of hundreds of pre-1900-era buildings, and an equal number of shipwrecks just off the coast. Bicycle rentals are abundant with some paved trails winding though the dune fields.

If none of those options are appealing, Mooncusser Tattoo offers several six-week tattoo and piercing instructional summer camps.