(1989)
Former Gull Hill Inn | Former Suzanne’s.
Somewhere under that siding and those modern windows looking impassively over Commercial Street is a much older building. In the 1930s and 1940s — if not earlier — Margaret Jane (McInnis) Crawley (1900-1977) operated the eight-table Gull Hill Inn here. Born to Mary (McMaster) McInnis (1875-1952) and James Henry McInnis (1870-1947), who lived here, she married Joseph Crawley (1898-1977) in 1924. The property was purchased in 1958 by Alfred T. and Frances Manacher, whom we met at 21 Commercial Street and 23 Commercial Street. Their daughter, Susan Hauser, opened an antique jewelry and arts-and-crafts store here in 1967. It was called Suzanne’s, and Hauser had to endure a fire that delayed the store’s debut by a week.
Twenty-Four Commercial was where I stayed on my very first visit to Provincetown, in the fall of 1989, with Roy Finamore, my partner at the time. That’s when I took the picture above, showing the comfortable, easy-going, 1970s Eclecto-Funky décor.
Since 1991, the property has been owned by Michael J. Piore, the David W. Skinner Professor of Political Economy (Emeritus) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a 1984 MacArthur Fellow.
¶ Last updated on 5 May 2018.
Lauren Richmond wrote on 15 November 2009: Back in the ’40s, it was called Gull Hill or Gull Hill Inn. It’s where my parents [Lawrence and Helene] would eat their meals when they stayed at Ursala Maine’s. For $7 a week they each got breakfast, lunch and dinner! For an extra 50 cents on Friday they would have a shore dinner complete with lobster, steamers, locally grown corn on the cob, and homemade blueberry pie. Jimmy Crawley’s mother [Margaret] ran the dining room and did all the cooking.