627 Commercial Street, Provincetown
The brick house on the Provincetown waterfront that Mailer bought in October 1983 and kept as his year-round home there until his death in 2007, dividing his time between it and Brooklyn Heights. After his death it housed the Norman Mailer Writers Colony until his children put it up for sale in 2013.
627 Commercial Street is the brick house on the Provincetown waterfront that Mailer purchased in October 1983. From that time on it was his year-round Provincetown home, where he spent as much of the year as in Brooklyn Heights (Lennon and Lennon 2018, p. 366), and it remained his until his death in 2007.
Before and after the purchase
Mailer knew the house long before he owned it. J. Michael Lennon‘s compiled list of Mailer’s residences (January 2006) records that he and Carol Stevens moved into the “Lily Harmon House, 627 Commercial St.” in October 1970 and rented it until May 1972, when they left for Stockbridge. He rented it again for the summers of 1982 and 1983, bought it in October 1983 jointly with Peter Manso, and bought Manso’s half from him in 1985 (Lennon, “Residences”).
The list then follows the house’s growing share of Mailer’s year (Lennon, “Residences”). Through the mid-1980s he spent the summer months there and the rest of the year at 142 Columbia Heights; he lived at 627 for all of 1987 and the first months of 1988; from 1989 to 1991 he was there from June to September; from 1992 to 1996 he spent half the year or more in Provincetown; and from 1996 the house was his year-round home. The published Days records him “now living full-time in Provincetown” in 2004 (Lennon and Lennon 2018, p. 376).
After Mailer
After Mailer’s death the house became the summer home of the Norman Mailer Writers Colony, run by the Norman Mailer Center, whose workshops and fellowships met there from 2009 through 2012. The Center and the Colony used it rent-free and hoped to buy it from Mailer’s children, but the Center did not raise the money by its March 2013 deadline, at a reduced price of $3.5 million. “At the end of the day, they didn’t come up with the money,” Michael Mailer told Boston.com (“Norman Mailer Estate Selling the Author’s Former Provincetown Home,” 11 June 2013), adding that the house was “just not a practical house to own” with most of the family living in New York or beyond. The children listed it that June; the reported asking price differs between $4 million (Boston.com) and $3.9 million (Samuel, “Norman Mailer’s House Is for Sale,” Electric Literature, 25 July 2013). The Cape Cod Times reported the listing on 29 June 2013 (Bragg, “Mailer’s Home in P’town Up for Sale”).
The house was sold, and with it ended the Colony’s years in Provincetown; the Colony met in Brooklyn Heights in 2013 and moved its workshops to Wilkes University in 2018 (Norman Mailer Center). A 2023 essay by a neighbor recalls the Colony’s summers there and how “the family put the house up for sale, effectively ending the Mailer Writers’ Colony era” (“An East End Summer Camp for Grown-Ups,” Provincetown Independent, 30 August 2023); the essay’s date for the later owner’s purchase, 2008, conflicts with the Colony’s use of the house through 2012, and the buyer and the sale date await a firmer source.
Related pages
- Provincetown | Brooklyn Heights | 142 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn | 565 Commercial Street, Provincetown | Stockbridge, Massachusetts
- 1970 | 1983 | 1985 | Carol Stevens | Peter Manso | Norman Mailer Center | Michael Mailer