Alden Street Cemetery | Cemetery No. 2 | Town Cemetery.
Not to be morbid about it, but the dead easily outnumber the living in Provincetown. That’s all right, though. They’re a very interesting lot — some of the town’s most prominent citizens, in fact — and well worth visiting. Apart from the old Winthrop Street burial ground, the town’s cemeteries are contiguous, so it’s easy to walk among them without being conscious of boundaries. The largest, with the official street address of 24 Cemetery Road, is now called the Alden Street Cemetery, but has been known variously as Town Cemetery, Old Cemetery (to distinguish it from the burial grounds on the east side of the road) or Cemetery No. 2 (to distinguish it from No. 1, at Winthrop Street).
An enormously welcome illustrated guide, Provincetown’s Historic Cemeteries and Memorials, was published in 2017 by the Provincetown Cemetery Commission, under the chairmanship of Richard Brayton Olson. The author and researcher was Amy Whorf McGuiggan, and Lynne Martin was the mapmaker.
Building Provincetown 2020 is adapting its map nomenclature and key numbers to make the two guides complementary.
Area A is that section of the Alden Street Cemetery where you’ll find the greatest concentration of world-renowned luminaries. Norman Mailer and Robert Motherwell are neighbors — just as they were in life. It’s rather like the Forest Lawn of Provincetown. Or, as it’s been called, its Parnassus.
Area N is the Alden Street Cemetery, New Section.
Area O is the Alden Street Cemetery, Old Section.
¶ Last updated on 12 June 2017. ¶ Image from Google.