174 Commercial Street

Reynolds Gallery (White Wind Inn gazebo).

The octagonal retail pavilion at the corner of Commercial and Winthrop Streets stands like a very large and conspicuous lawn ornament for the White Wind Inn, 174 Commercial Street. “The story we’ve been told is that it was built when Sandra [Rich] owned it, originally to be a sandwich shop for her son to run,” said Brian W. Calhoon, one of the owners of the inn at this writing. “It has had dozens of tenants in the decades.” John Lisbon was responsible for constructing it, around 1977. A discussion of its development appeared in a Facebook thread on My Provincetown Memorabilia Collection, administered by Salvador R. Vasques III, beginning 18 January 2018. “Very contentious building permit/zoning issues at the time Sandra Rich owned it,” the lawyer Christopher J. Snow wrote. “Probably wouldn’t have flown even a year later,” Joel Grozier added.

The White Wind Inn gazebo under construction in the mid-1970s. Photo by Gregory Katz for the Advocate. Posted by Salvador R. Vasques III on his Facebook page My Provincetown Memorabilia Collection, 18 January 2018.

Image from a contact sheet, stapled to a survey form from the Massachusetts Historical Commission Inventory, at the Provincetown Public Library.

“Build first, ask questions later,” was Rick Murray’s note. The project displeased Joseph T. “Joe the Barber” Ferreira, not the least because it blocked views from Commercial Street of his barber shop at 1 Winthrop. “Needless to say, he was none too happy about its construction,” John Thomas wrote. “I can remember sitting in the chair and listening to his opinion about it.”

A very incomplete list of businesses would begin in the late 1980s with Will Moppert’s Ptown Spin, a CD store that moved in the 2000s into considerably expanded quarters at 173 Commercial Street.

From Edel Byrne’s One of a Kind Stained Glass website.

Glass Gazebo sign at 174 Commercial in 2010. Photo by David W. Dunlap.

From the late 2000s until 2012, this was the appropriately named Glass Gazebo, in which the Irish artist Edel Byrne showcased her work in stained glass and that of others. On her website, she described her work this way: “Each piece is unique and holds her signature style of ‘lace leadwork,’ reflecting a medieval style springing from her Celtic heritage. Mixing lead and glass stones, Edel creates a style that could only be called Medieval Expressionism.” Christie Andresen wrote about Byrne on the Taqwa Glassworks Studio website: “The distinctive architectural style and flowing floral designs are beautifully designed and crafted.”¹

“It’s hard to know where to look first,” Brian S. of Warwick, R.I., wrote in his Yelp review in 2010. “In addition to incredible glass sculptures, various stained glass windows and colorful transoms with bizarre or traditional geometric patterns are scattered throughout the small store as well as smaller glass decorations. Color, light and shape is everywhere.”²

Glass Gazebo closed after the 2012 season. Byrne’s studio is now in Putney, Vt. She was followed at 174 Commercial by Steve Lyons Art in 2013. Lyons was born in Ohio and educated at Eastern Kentucky University and Louisiana State University. Though employed as a corporate writer, he painted constantly, developing an impasto technique, working on wood scraps. In 2011, he began exhibiting his seascapes informally on the porch of 108 Commercial Street, which he playfully dubbed the Front Steps Gallery.

Left: Steve Lyons, in a photo by Deborah Minsky for the Provincetown Banner/Wicked Local, published 29 June 2013. Right: Lyons’s sign, pictured here in the yard at 108 Commercial Street after he left the gazebo. The flora in the foreground is real. Dunlap, 2014.

The gazebo was not so much a gallery as a working studio, Deborah Minsky wrote for the Banner in June 2013. “With an open exhibition area lining the main part of the gazebo- or kiosk-shaped space, and a small, carefully organized niche towards the rear for his easel and paints, [Lyons] can simultaneously greet visitors and continue to work on his latest canvas.”

“So at ease is Lyons with this arrangement that he often invites visitors, especially children, to help him with paint and a brush at his own easel. … This is not a ‘please don’t touch’ kind of place. … Canvases just finished but still wet are spread on the floor. Visitors need to step around them. Other works too numerous to be displayed rest against each other on the floor along one wall.”³

Coffey Men moved to the gazebo in 2014. Fun fact: the sailor is Scott Coffey’s father. Dunlap.

“The photo of the empty mannequins is from the day I moved in,” Scott Coffey said in sharing this photograph.

Coffey Men in the gazebo. Courtesy of Scott Coffey.

Gail Crosman Moore’s jewelry shop opened in the gazebo in 2015. Posted by Gail Crosman Moore on Facebook, 1 May 2015.

Coffey Men, Scott Coffey’s distinctive apparel shop, occupied the gazebo in the 2014 and 2015 seasons, before he moved to 173 Commercial Street. He was followed in 2015 by Gail Crosman Moore, a jeweler and sculptor who was graduated from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design who describes her mission as “being called to illustrate the exceptional phases of life through metaphor; the life cycle of a seedpod.”

Next came Lighthouse Candles, which operated from the gazebo through 2019. John Copell was the proprietor (or, in any case, the party representing Lighthouse Candles before the Zoning Board of Appeals in 2018, seeking a special permit to display candles and artwork outside the gazebo).

To Rest for a Moment, by Peg Reynolds, 16 by 16 inches. From the Peg Reynolds Fine Art website.

Left: Peg Reynolds. Right: Spirit of Light and Darkness, by Peg Reynolds, 14 by 14 inches. From the Peg Reynolds Fine Art website.

Peg Reynolds opened the Reynolds Gallery in the difficult and challenging summer of 2020. She was raised on Long Island and educated at Cornell University. Her career was in social work. Reynolds came to Provincetown in 1998 and, a decade later, simply began to paint. Her artist’s statement paraphrases Charles W. Hawthorne: “It is our job as an artist to be of some use in the world by adding to the sum total of beauty in it. And this is my intention with the scenes I choose, the colors I apply and with each brush stroke I touch to the canvas: That is my reason for painting.”

Dunlap, 2010.