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Kerry urges TCP status for dune shacks
Banner Daily Update posted Sat. Aug. 18
By Kaimi Rose Lum
Banner Staff
PROVINCETOWN — Dune dwellers gained the support of Sen. John Kerry this week in their bid for a special status on the National Register of Historic Places.
On Wednesday, Sen. Kerry asked the National Park Service to reverse a previous decision and designate the dune shack district of Provincetown and Truro a “traditional cultural property,” a category reserved on the National Register for places that harbor important, living cultural resources and are important to the identity of the community as a whole. The Keeper of the National Register, a division of the Park Service, denied the dune shacks that status in May even after the Park Service’s own hired ethnographers determined that the shacks met the criteria for a “TCP.”
“I am concerned that the decision to deny designation is in direct conflict with the May 2006 ethnography study ... by Robert Wolfe and T.J. Ferguson, commissioned by your agency,”’ Kerry wrote to the director of the National Park Service, Mary Bomar.
Kerry challenged the Park Service’s argument that the dune shack district does not qualify for TCP status because the groups inhabiting it are “fluid, evolving” and vary from one year to the next.
“While some of the population varies year to year based on the rental property administered by the Provincetown Community Compact and the Peaked Hill Trust, this in no way diminishes the value of the culture, especially given that many of the shacks are occupied by multiple generations of the same family and some individuals have made the shacks their homes for over 50 summers,” he wrote.
Jerry Gaumer, a spokesperson for the National Park Service, said Friday he was unclear on the procedure Bomar and the Keeper would need to follow in order to reconsider the decision, should they reconsider. Bomar was out of the office this week and unable to comment, he said.
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Aug 16th, 2007