143B Commercial Street

David W. Dunlap

11 years ago

Snow cottages.

Between the beach and the Snow family’s main house at 143 Commercial were two modest cottages that the family rented out seasonally. The waterfront cottage — two bedrooms and a loft — was constructed around 1930, according to town records, while the cottage closest to the house — two single-room units — was built in 1940. “Many notable Provincetown immigrants cemented their love of year-round life in Provincetown by occupying these quaint, quintessentially old Cape Cod seasonal cottages,” Christopher J. Snow said, including David Kaplan, the author of Tennessee Williams in Provincetown, and Victor DePoalo, proprietor of Victor’s restaurant, 175 Bradford Avenue Extension.

As fate would have it, one of the summer tenants at the beachside cottage in 1999 was George N. Tagaris, the president of Phoenix Design and Development of Boston. Ten years later, his partner, Ryan Shergold, rented a property next door. So it was that when the Snow family put No. 141 and No. 143 on the market, Tagaris and Shergold said they “saw the opportunity to make their dreams of owning a home in Provincetown a reality.” Realizing that dream, however, required the demolition of the old Snow cottages in March 2017.

The cottages are seen toward the left of this photograph. The tower in the distance, at right, is that of the second Cententary Methodist Episcopal Church, meaning that the picture was taken some time in 1910 or thereafter. Courtesy of George N. Tagaris.

The cottage closest to the main house is seen in a photo taken in 2004 for the Massachusetts Historical Commission.

A 2010 aerial photo, by David W. Dunlap, shows the two cottages and, beyond them, what was then the vacant lot where the Snow family homestead once stood.