PROVINCETOWN, Mass. — There was only one destination of choice for the literary set looking to leave New York City during the sweltering summer of 1916: Provincetown, at the outermost tip of Cape Cod. Once there, writers like John Reed and Louise Bryant, the playwright Eugene O’Neill, and an assorted cast of Greenwich Village radicals all converged on the sprawling 18th-century, eight-bedroom home of Mary Heaton Vorse, a celebrated labor reporter and the grande dame of the avant-garde. The goal of those heady salons? “Free love and communism!” quipped Ken Fulk, the new owner of the Vorse house.
Yet rather than flipping the home after his $1.17 million purchase, or dividing it into condos — the fate of so many other antique buildings in this town where nearly 75 percent of the homes are now second homes or owned by investors — he has spent $1.25 million more to meticulously restore its interiors to that 1916 moment and open it to the public on July 2 as one of New England’s newest arts centers. Mr. Fulk hopes his move will help shore up Provincetown’s fraying cultural vitality and reconnect it to younger generations of artists who have been priced out.
...
Read full article at nytimes.com.
