| SEVERAL years ago a historian at the Provincetown Heritage Museum suggested that the Harvey Dodd Gallery occupies the oldest structure in Provincetown but because the building’s exterior has been extensively altered its historic significance is considered minimal.
One can only estimate its construction date. The style is that of the original homes built throughout the Cape between the 1640’s and the 1790’s (and emulated in the 20th Century in millions of homes throughout America as the "Cape Cod Cottage"). This is an original Cape Cod "half-house". They were usually built for widows. Unlike the classic Cape Cod Cottage with a pair of windows on either side of a central doorway, the half-house eliminates two of the windows. Presently, a perfectly restored full Cape Cod Cottage stands directly across the street from the gallery. Originally, access to other parts of Provincetown and to the rest of the world was exclusively by boat and every building in town faced the water. This structure was turned around when Commercial Street was built. With the exception of a few houses in the far West End of town, this is the only original Cape Cod Cottage on the south side of Commercial Street. Why it is the sole "floated" structure in the East End is anyone’s guess. Still in existence behind the gallery are the remnants of two fishing wharves once part of a boat landing. The Avelar family, who lived in this house in the 1930’s, converted the landing into rental units and named it Camp Avelar. It acquired its present name, Poor Richard’s Landing, when Richard Lischer purchased the landing in the late 1960’s. Mr. Lischer died recently, but his combination of flamboyance and architectural refinement, along with his incomparable garden, transformed the landing into a permanent showplace of charm and enchantment. Katan Toys was the first business to open here, in the late ‘60s, followed by The Woodpecker Wood Carvers occupying what was once the living room of the old house. Originally a stairway existed just inside the door to the immediate left. When the Harvey Dodd Gallery opened in 1971 the two front windows were replaced with the present bay with French doors, and the single window on the side of the house was replaced with a door. The second floor was extended to the adjoining house, forming the present covered arcade where paintings are shown in the summer. When a new floor was laid in the late 1970’s a circular cellar was discovered and is now accessed through a trap door in the gallery. In the late 1980’s, a vast amount of sand was dredged from the end of the Town Wharf for new pier construction. This sand was spread along the shore for a half mile, displacing the mean-high-water line several hundred feet and creating a beach in its place. The consequence was to bury the landing’s pilings beneath sand. Previously one could dive off the landing at high tide, or watch (and hear) the tide recede, placing the landing 14 feet above the sand at low tide, twice a day. Now one can jump off the end of the landing onto sand 5 feet below. The price for this protection against storming seas is the permanent loss of one of the unique charms of Provincetown. Today the Harvey Dodd Gallery is acclaimed as the only gallery in Provincetown retaining a feeling of "Old Cape Cod". The rustic interior of the gallery, raw flooring and rough-out walls, retains the simple look appropriate to the external appearance of the building. It is the perfect venue for artwork with Cape Cod as its subject matter, and the scale, mood and presentation of the work enhances, rather than overwhelms, the natural ambiance of the space. The Harvey Dodd Gallery, definitely Provincetown’s oldest art gallery,
exists in what may very well be Provincetown’s oldest building.
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Evidently the original house was part of a community built across
the harbor at Long Point and floated to the mainland in the 1860’s
as a security measure during the Civil War. Except for this particular
house these structures are all presently located in the West End.