Frenchie’s Shack | Dune Shack 13 (Wolfe)
Salvatore Del Deo (in sunlight) and Josephine Del Deo (in shadow) dining at Frenchie’s Shack in 2009. [Dunlap]
Left: Josephine at the shack, around 1986. [Courtesy of Josephine Del Deo] Right: At the shack in 2009. [Dunlap]
[2009, Dunlap]
[2009, Dunlap]
[2009, Dunlap]
The Provincetown Independent told the story on 15 June 2023. Fortunately the eviction was short-lived.
Text last updated in 2015 | Near the original site of the 1914 Peaked Hill Bars station, a dune shack was built in 1941 or 1942 for Jeanne “Frenchie” Chanel — chanteuse, naïf, “mystic, spiritualist, part bird, part creature of the unknown instincts man has lost,” as Josephine Del Deo wrote. Since 1953, the caretakers of the shack have been the painter Salvatore Del Deo and his wife, Josephine, who was a leader with Ross Moffett of the fight during the ’50s and ’60s to create the Cape Cod National Seashore. When shifting sands had all but buried the original tarpaper-and-dirt-floor shack in 1976, the current structure was built on top of it. The Del Deos have shared use of the site by arrangement first with Chanel and then, after her death in 1983, with her daughter, Adrienne Schnell. Josephine died in 2016. [Update: As part of its generally misguided attempt to re-lease the dune shacks in 2023, the National Park Service actually evicted 94-year-old Sal Del Deo from this shack, which rangers then boarded up. A national outcry forced the service to retreat. In October, the Del Deo family won a five-year lease extension.]
About the shacks
Along the Back Shore, settlement meets sea, and the built environment is humbled. The Pilgrim Monument looks distant, almost inconsequential. There is no place for human-engineered grandeur against the mighty Atlantic Ocean, the treacherous Peaked Hill Bars, and the towering, ever-shifting dunes. Instead, snugness, modesty, and adaptability are rewarded. Structures perform the most elementary services of salvation and shelter.
From the Old Harbor station to the Truro line are Provincetown’s 15 renowned dune shacks. (Three more — the Wells, Jones and Armstrong shacks — are slightly east of the Truro line. They’re included in the Peaked Hill Bars Historic District, but not in Provincetown Encyclopedia.)
The very notion of these shacks is happily inimical to precision. Dates, occupants, and anecdotes will inevitably differ among sources. There isn’t even an agreed-upon naming convention. Provincetown Encyclopedia borrows the west-to-east numbering system used by Robert J. Wolfe in his seminal 2005 study for the Park Service, “Dwelling in the Dunes.”
The shacks are a source of identity to the town and a half-century of tension between residents and the National Park Service. The definition of cultural landmarks has expanded to embrace such eccentric structures, which once would have been swept away to render the seashore as pristine as possible. Indeed, some shacks were razed, leaving the dune community especially wary of the park service’s intentions. It wasn’t until 2010 that a comprehensive management plan was advanced for all 18 shacks.
In 2023, the dune shack community — whose members trace their occupancy back as far as the 1940s, long before the creation of the national seashore — was convulsed by an ominous new threat. The service announced that it would evict most current residents and re-lease the structures, apparently putting a premium on getting top dollar. When the rangers came for 94-year-old Salvatore Del Deo, as they did, the story drew the attention of the national press (including The New York Times) and of Senators Edward Markey and Elizabeth Warren. The park service was compelled by political pressure, bad press, and local outrage to relent — just a bit. As I write this summary in November 2023, however, the situation remains fluid. (This was the most recent development: “2 of 8 Leases May Go to Local Applicants; But One Previous Dune Family Gives Up, Worn Down by the Process,” by Paul Benson, The Provincetown Independent, 21 November 2023.)
If you want to see the shacks for yourself, the best way is on foot, but this can be arduous. It makes sense for a newcomer to get the lay of the land in one of the SUVs operated by Art’s Dune Tours. The business was founded in 1946 by Arthur J. Costa as Art’s Beach Taxi and is continued by his son, Robert Costa.
Important dune etiquette: If you go out to see the shacks, please maintain a respectful distance from them. Dune residents are out there for solitude, tranquillity and privacy, not to entertain strangers or answer questions.
¶ Republished on 4 December 2023.