Anyone trying to reside in distant, rustic fashion on the Cape now has their likelihood, with the eight of the area’s historic “dune shacks” now up for ten yr leases.
“The opportunity to submit a proposal to lease any of these eight properties is competitive and is open to all interested persons and businesses,” the National Parks Service mentioned in an announcement.
The eight properties, situated within the Peaked Hill Bars National Register of Historic District in Provincetown and Truro, are described as “small, weathered” buildings — arrange for individuals who don’t thoughts mountain climbing into their seashore home and pumping water out of a effectively.
The shacks can be found for between $2,000 and $16,000 a yr and vary from a 120 sq. foot, one-room construction to a 2.3 acre lot with a 590 sq. foot shack and separate visitor cottage.
The historic properties are “often built on pilings to adjust for the ever-moving sand dunes surrounding these properties,” the parks service wrote, and largely have “limited” working water, plumbing, and electrical energy. There aren’t any paved roads resulting in the dune shacks, which means folks could attain them by foot or 4×4 automobile.
The unique dune shacks have a protracted historical past courting again to quite a lot of buildings constructed across the Peaked Hill Bars lifesaving station within the late 1800s, in response to the New England Historical Society. Most of the surviving buildings have been constructed across the Nineteen Twenties when artists started to maneuver into the world.
The primitive residences have attracted a spread of artists and writers over the past century, together with so-called “Poet of the Dunes” Harry Kemp, Henry David Thoreau, Jack Kerouac, Jackson Pollock, Tennessee Williams, Norman Mailer and Ann Patchett. The place reportedly turned out a few of the many artists most well-known works, in response to the historic society, together with a part of “On the Road” and “A Streetcar Named Desire.”
In the final a number of years, at the least two are nonetheless accessible for short-term artist residencies by way of the Provincetown Community Compact.
For the 10-year leases, residents can be anticipated to “occupy and maintain the dune shack as a traditional dune shack,” NPS detailed, together with performing a repairs and routine upkeep required.
The parks service will information web site visits by appointment on June 15 and settle for the primary spherical of proposals on July 3. Leases start on Sept. 1.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”