[2011, Dunlap]
Melville Coté (1937-2019) and his wife, Polly Coté (d2017), purchased this house in 1998 for $225,000. Polly, a graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, was an artist and arts teacher. Mel, who held a doctorate in education from Harvard, was among the founders in 1969 of the College of the Atlantic on Mount Desert Island in Acadia National Park. After living in Hawaii, Cambridge, Nigeria, Princeton, New Hampshire, and Bar Harbor, the Cotés — who were married at St. Peter the Apostle in 1961 — returned to Provincetown in 1999.
“Mel immersed himself in local organizations like the shellfish commission, harbor committee, and Center for Coastal Studies,” his obituary in The Provincetown Independent stated. “He started a garden care business with Polly, and together they hosted memorable dinner parties for family and a never-ending parade of friends from Provincetown and their world travels. They adored their pet dogs and cats and went on long walks in town and at the beach, often ending up chatting with friends at the Old Colony Tap. Mel loved fishing and clamming to supplement their bountiful garden harvest. No one will forget the extraordinary Halloween costumes Mel and Polly wore to the annual Beachcombers party, or how they tore up the floor dancing every New Year’s Eve.”1
Mel wrote to Building Provincetown on 9 October 2014: “We bought this house in 1998. It had been owned by Paul Koch, a local artist photographer. It was put together with the original house in front and additions for the middle and back.” The Cotés sold the property to a Provincetown couple in 2016 for $947,500.
Paul Koch is a poet and a prolific photographer in his own right, whose work often appeared in the Provincetown Advocate. He has also collected glass-plate negatives of old Provincetown scenes. He donated nearly 130 negatives in 1990 to the Provincetown Heritage Museum. Many of them can be viewed in the Glass Plate Collection of the Provincetown History Preservation Project.
1 “Mel Coté, Who Helped Create College of the Atlantic, Dies at 82,” The Provincetown Independent, 25 December 2019.