(2014)
Brass Key Guesthouse | Gatehouse.
The Gatehouse — a unit of the Brass Key compound, 67 Bradford Street — was built in the 1850s. William H. Young and his family lived here and next door, 10 Carver Street, where their lives are discussed more fully. The Rev. James F. Albion of the Universalist church lived here in the late 1920s. In the 1930s, Mrs. Fred H. Graham [?] held weekly duplicate bridge contests here, the results of which she would chronicle for The Advocate in a column called “Tops and Bottoms.” (This seems the perfect point on which not to comment.)
Joseph and Virginia (Souza) Lewis lived here in the 1960s. Lewis was a founder of the Portuguese-American Civic League. He and his wife also owned the Pilgrim House for 17 years. In 1897, when Lewis was a year old, his father, also named Joseph, shipped out aboard the schooner Susan R. Stone for a cod-fishing trip to the Western Bank. She was never heard from. Lewis’s father and 18 others were lost.
The houses at 12 and 10 Carver Street were known together in the 1980s as Haven House, before being acquired by and incorporated into the Brass Key parcel. (Both are now known officially as 67 Bradford Street.) In 2009, the Brass Key’s private guest lounge opened to the public as the Shipwreck Lounge, owned and operated by Tom Walter, Ken Masi and David Sanford. “Almost overnight, the Shipwreck Lounge has become one of Provincetown’s most popular nightspots,” Guy Wolf wrote on Provincetown.com. “Walter credits the bar’s immediate success to Facebook and Twitter. ‘People were writing of Facebook, ‘I am going to the Shipwreck Lounge,’ The response would be, ‘Where?’”
One is left wondering what Joseph Lewis would have thought of the name.
¶ Last updated on 9 January 2010.