217 Bradford Street. [2009, Dunlap]
217 Bradford Street. [2013, Dunlap]
217 Bradford Street. [2008, Dunlap]
217 Bradford Street. [2008, Dunlap]
Text last updated on 11 January 2010 | Great Italianate brackets at the front door — and a small ship’s wheel on the door jamb — ornament this otherwise appealingly plain building, which was constructed between 1870 and 1880.
The well-loved Elizabeth I. “Lizzie” Livingston (±1879-1945) made her home at 217 Bradford Street in the early 20th century. Around 1918, she opened a candy, ice cream and soda store at 409 Commercial Street. “She has sold penny candy during her quarter of a century to Provincetown mothers and fathers when they were children, just as she served their children,” the Advocate noted at the time of her retirement in 1943, forced by ill health. “And, she said, the older folk don’t change much. They still edge over with a hankering toward the penny candy case.” Her parents were Nova Scotian: Capt. Alexander Livingston of Cape Bretton and Susan Doggett Livingston of Liverpool. Before opening her candy store, Miss Livingston had worked in the stationery, magazine, and news shop run by Fred Dearborn, who was married to her sister Addie, and in a jewelry and news shop run by Henry Wippich. “One of Miss Livingston’s interesting hobbies was elephants fashioned from bone, ivory and other materials,” the Advocate reported, without noting whether she made or collected them.
Francis W. Stark (b ±1911) was living here by the late 1940s. As an agent for the Whitehead Brothers Sand Company in the early 1950s, he was instrumental in seeing to the delivery of the clean sand from Beach Point that the company donated to the Howland Street playground (now the Muriel Greensfelder Playground) at 211½ Bradford Street.
¶ Republished on 7 October 2023.
217 Bradford Street on the Town Map, showing property lines.