(November 2009.)
Former Provincetown Community Center.
The Colonial Revival-style New Governor Bradford School rose from the ashes of the original. Nearly 100 pupils were enrolled here before it closed in the mid ’50s. The building reopened as the Provincetown Community Center in 1956, under the charge of the town Recreation Commission. Its primary focus, Susan Leonard recalled, was after-school programs: arts-and-crafts classes, Ping Pong, Camp Fire Girls and Boy Scouts; the halls echoing with the voices of easily a hundred kids. Friday night dances were the place to be for P.H.S. students, she said, and almost everyone’s first real date was here. This was also the birthplace in the winter of 1971 of the Outer Cape Repertory Film Society, founded by the artist Raymond Elman, who showed 16-millimeter prints. “My proudest moment was concocting a double feature of Orson Welles’s Macbeth and Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood,” he told me in 2013. The center moved in 2013 to the Veterans Memorial Elementary School.
Update 7 April 2016: A plan under which the developer James Savko would have been allowed to acquire this property in exchange for the Winslow Farm parcel on 44-48 Winslow Street was rejected 168-to-110 at a Special Town Meeting. The future of the building is unclear.