12 Washington Avenue

[2012, Dunlap]

David L. Chambers and John G. Crane. [St. Johnsbury Academy]

Updated on 14 September 2025 | There’s an understandable tendency for homeowners to exaggerate the age of their homes, giving them that much more historical patina. But David L. Chambers and his husband, John G. Crane, who have owned 12 Washington Avenue since 2002, came across evidence that buttressed an antebellum construction date for this full Cape. “We were told she was built about 1860, which is consistent with a newspaper dated 1859 that we found stuffed in a wall, apparently as insulation,” Chambers told me in 2025.

Over the last century, the house has changed hands only six times. Frank Dutra (1867-1949) and Mary (Nunes) Dutra (1866-1950) sold the property in 1925 to Louis Andre and Mary Rosa Andre. They sold it back to the Dutras in 1941, who owned it another three years before selling to the fisherman Clarence Alves Serpa (1905-1990) and his wife, Edith Irene (Avila) Serpa (1904-1998). The Serpas had lived in the house since 1932, when they were newlyweds.

Edith grew up at 165 Bradford Street. Her father, Carlos Avila, immigrated from the Azores. Edith was graduated from Provincetown High School in 1925. At the time of their marriage, she was a waitress at the Pilgrim House, 336 Commercial Street. Like many Provincetown boys, Clarence, whose home was at 37 Alden Street, skipped high school to work in the fishery. When he married Edith, Clarence was employed at the Provincetown Cold Storage freezer complex, 363-365 Commercial Street, where the Johnson Street parking lot is now.

Clarence served as the cook for at least two boats on which he was a crew member: the dragger Clara M., skippered by Capt. Domingo Godinho, in the mid-1940s, and the 70-foot scalloper Stephen R., christened in 1956, owned by Capt. Frank L. Reis and skippered by Capt. Frank L. Reis Jr. In August 1946, Clara M. took the Republican gubernatorial candidate, Lieut. Gov. Robert F. Bradford, out to drag for whiting and ground fish. Serpa “wanted to get a real fisherman’s breakfast into the Bay State’s second highest official,” the Advocate reported, but Bradford settled for fruit, cheese, doughnuts, and coffee. (He was elected governor anyway.)

The Serpas owned 12 Washington Street until 1983 when they sold it for $48,000 to the artist Pasquale Natale, who had studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and was living in the North End at the time. “The house needed work,” he recalled in a statement for Italianità: Contemporary Art Inspired by the Italian Immigrant Experience. “On Friday I’d walk to the harbor in Boston to catch the ferry, and then walk from the landing in Provincetown to my little house. Back and forth. I loved being there. I loved working on the house or in the garden. I kept stretching my weekends so that I wouldn’t leave until Tuesday.

“In 1985 I tested positive for HIV. I thought, If I am going to die, where to I want to be? What do I want to do? At that point I’d been doing interior design in Boston. I didn’t want to spend my time fussing over window treatments, so I left my apartment and moved to Provincetown. Not long after the move I was offered a weeklong workshop at Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts up in Wiscasset, Maine. The experience of being in the studio 10-12 hours a day, working in clay, making things, was profound. It didn’t matter what the objects looked like, it was the pleasure of making.

“I put one of my pieces — a shelf with a chair and empty bowl — in the Provincetown AIDS Auction I’d founded. Berta Walker, an art dealer in town, bought it and offered me a show. My crosses came out of that show. They’re actually plus signs. To be HIV positive was not good, but this work was positive for me. From there I made clay vessels. Some had lids topped with chairs or houses. Once I hook onto an icon like the plus, chair, or house, I work with in in many different materials. These elements are symbolic of home. Home to me can be a village, a family, a relationship. I am fortunate to have all of them in my life.”

Gene Parseghian, a talent agent who “dominated the film scene in New York,” in the words of The New York Times, bought the house for $215,000 in 1995, together with his partner (later husband), Michael D. Colberg. Parseghian was among the last movie agents based in Manhattan, rather than in Los Angeles. But his client list was formidable: Betty Buckley, Olympia Dukakis, Daniel Day Lewis, Eddie Redmayne, and Kathleen Turner were among the actors he represented.

Chambers and Crane purchased the house from Parseghian and Colberg in 2002 for $520,000. Crane grew up on a chicken farm in Vermont. “I remember a crystallizing moment when I knew absolutely that my future would be different from my fatherʼs,” he told the Dartmouth College Oral History Program in 2012. “One day I was walking through one of the hen houses carrying two full baskets of eggs. At one point, I slipped and fell into the deep, sloppy manure with 200 broken eggs covering me. As I lay there, I thought, ‘I donʼt know what my future is — but this is not it!’”

He matriculated at Dartmouth in 1965, after graduating from St. Johnsbury Academy in Vermont. He immersed himself in the work of Aquinas House, the Roman Catholic center. “I was sort of channeling a lot of my sexual energy into a spiritual kind of experience — I was very celibate and engaged in virtually no sexual activity during that time, even though I was hugely attracted to other men,” Crane recalled in the oral history. “There was another student in New Hampshire Hall who it was assumed by everyone to be gay … who was really shunned and treated very badly. And so I knew what would happen when people believed you were gay, and I wasnʼt about to put myself in that position.” Crane’s subsequent studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education were interrupted by service in the Navy. He wed a “wonderful woman” named Katie, with whom he remained married for 19 years. He quit Harvard after one more semester, and enrolled instead in the graduate library program at Simmons University in Boston.

As John Crane’s college years were coming to an end in 1969, David Chambers was just beginning a long teaching career at the University of Michigan Law School in Ann Arbor. He grew up in Indiana, graduated from Princeton in 1962, and earned a J.D. degree at Harvard Law. Chambers “is noted for work on the differing experiences of men and women in the law profession as well as for work on AIDS and on child custody, same-sex marriage, and other issues in family law,” Michigan Law stated in a thumbnail biography. His first book, Making Fathers Pay: The Enforcement of Child Support, was published in 1979.

That year, Crane was named circulation services librarian in Baker Library at Dartmouth, to which he’d returned. “My job was more than just what was in the job description; it was helping to breathe new life into the whole organization,” Crane said in the oral history. By the 1990s, Crane was fully out of the closet. He cofounded the Coalition for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Concerns at Dartmouth and was deeply involved in bringing the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt to Dartmouth’s hockey arena. His most prominent architectural legacy at Dartmouth is Berry Library, designed by Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, which opened in 2002. Crane served as the chairman of the building committee. He was also Dartmouth’s interim librarian twice.

Chambers and Crane once had to conduct a “commuter relationship” across a distance of nearly 600 miles. No longer. Chambers retired from the University of Michigan in 2003, a year after he and Crane bought 12 Washington Avenue. He’s now the Wade H. McCree Jr. Collegiate Professor Emeritus of Law and a published novelist. The Old Whitaker Place was co-winner of the 2009 Novella Prize awarded by the Miami University Press. Crane, for his part, said in 2012 that he’d become “the artist that I wanted to be, a printmaker as well as working with fiber: spinning, knitting.”