David Dunlap Is Endlessly Building Provincetown
TIME AND THE TOWN
A reissue of his 2015 book highlights a feast of local color
BY HOWARD KARREN SEP 1, 2021
SOURCE: PROVINCETOWN INDEPENDENT
David W. Dunlap’s Building Provincetown is an ongoing project with a worthy aim: to create a comprehensive history of the town — that is, its residents, year-round and part-time, and all the astonishing work and eccentric play they are known for. But it’s organized in a counterintuitive way.
Dunlap, a veteran New York Times journalist and author, has chosen to tell people’s stories by cataloguing the buildings they inhabit. That’s right — buildings: homes, stores, inns, galleries, studios, restaurants, bars, factories, banks, schools, docked ships, dune shacks, stables, and any other structure that illuminates the lives of those within. In short, the organizing principle for Dunlap’s 2015 book, Building Provincetown: A Guide to Its Social and Cultural History, Told Through Its Architecture, and the websites he has developed as a byproduct — buildingprovincetown.wordpress.com and buildingprovincetown2020.org — is, simply, a street address.
David Dunlap takes a selfie on the beach by St. Mary of the Harbor in Provincetown’s East End in 2013. (Photo courtesy David W. Dunlap)
