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The Beach was Main Street

“In the early days of Provincetown,” says J. D. B., in the Provincetown Advocate, “the beach between high and low water was the main thoroughfare of the town.” Anyone building a wharf was required to leave room underneath for the passage of horse-drawn wagons. At high tide, when the beach was covered, small boats carried the town’s traffic.

Most of Provincetown was then built in single file along the water’s edge. Property owners claimed title to a given stretch of harbor shoreline, their lots extending back to the ocean shore. As soon as the town began to expand in the direction it could town landings provided the only access to the fishflakes and meadows behind the shore front.

With the shift from waterborne to land-based traffic, town landings fell into comparative discuse, but they remained public property… “Where once the dorymen landed their fish, now the summer motorists land carloads of bathers.”

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