[2008, Dunlap]
[2010, Dunlap]
[2010, Dunlap]
Updated on 18 January 2013. | Technically speaking, Provincetown has only one breakwater, and this is it. (The extraordinary structure in the West End that almost everyone, including me, calls a “breakwater” is — more truly — a dike.) The purpose of this 2,500-foot-long structure, which rises 15½ feet above mean low water, is to calm the waves of the harbor before they reach the central piers at which the fishing fleet is moored.
The project took almost a quarter century to realize. Construction was authorized by Congress in 1948, but not financed, though the funding formula was set: the federal government would pay 75 percent of the estimated $1.5 million cost, while the town would pick up 25 percent, or about $380,000. Twenty-one years later, when the project had cleared enough political obstacles to get going, the town’s share was unchanged: still $380,000 out of a project that had by then soared in cost to $4 million.1 The money was approved at a Special Town Meeting in 1969.
Work then began in earnest. The contractor, the Campanella Corporation, placed an array of core and bedding stones, topped by armor stones weighing five to eight tons apiece, in a line nearly one-half mile long. The project was completed in the summer of 1972. The breakwater’s unintended secondary function is as a kind of cormorant sanctuary. The artist Pat de Groot of 505-507 Commercial Street chronicled these remarkable creatures up close, paddling out to the breakwater in her kayak to get eye-to-eye, if not feather-to-feather.
1 “After 24 Years of Effort, the Construction of Provincetown’s Breakwater Is Completed,” Provincetown Advocate, 17 August 1972.