Role of the Cape Cod National Seashore
The National Seashore has essentially created an urban growth boundary by constructing a green belt on the outer side of the Cape, effectively restricting the proliferation of private residences that would limit access of those lands and the beach for the general public. Before the creation of the National Seashore, people had been able to own property across the Cape, but after the park was formed in 1962 there was a regulation that disallowed any new properties to be built. There was a building hiatus implemented between 1959 and 1962 during which new homes that were constructed were done so at the risk of the owner. Individuals who intended to build during this period were required to make a deal with the NPS, drawing up a long-term lease for the land, typically for 40 years or less. While this may have at the time seemed long enough for there to have been an opportunity to renew the lease, numerous residents were not so lucky and many properties have actually been required to be demolished or turned over to the park because their leases have expired.
Development Within the Park
The building hiatus is understandable in the context of the development that was intended for the Cape. The follow images illustrates all of the current private land holdings within the National Seashore, the majority of which were never developed. The yellow lines merely indicate the boundaries of land that were once privately owned but have now been included and protected within the National Seashore. For homeowners that are living on plots that are within the boundary, they still have the rights of a private landowner but are required to comply with a variety of NPS rules that dictate how to live within a national park, influencing decisions like renovations done to the property and limits on increases to the footprint of the house. In the case of needing to move a home within the National Seashore, these moves are subject to more stringent processes involving review by the town’s Conservation Commission.
Map of all private parcels within the National Seashore.
The following map provides a close up of what these private parcels truly illustrate about the development that would have happened if the National Seashore had not been created. In the middle of the map is a series of small lots that would have been turned into an entire neighborhood bisecting the backshore, where the dune shacks are now located. The long lateral lines are the original wood lots that existed; they vary in width because wider lots were allotted if there was less quality wood on that lot, versus thinner lots that would have contained more densely wooded areas.
A close-up of private land holdings on the backshore in Provincetown, showing various wood lots and parcels that were intended to be turned into more development.
If the vision for these lots would have been allowed to come to fruition then much of the great expanse of the dunes would have been sold off parcel by parcel to individuals and developers looking to have prime Cape realty, destroying the landscape that has made it such a desirable place to visit and live. Mike Winkler, a local contractor reflected on a commonly held sentiment:
…without the National Seashore it would have been horrifying, it would have been like Miami Beach or Orchard Beach. It’s a good thing we got the park.
Similarly Dave Donaldson, a docent at the Highland Lighthouse remarked:
The National Seashore has done a nice job in maintaining the whole area. And you can see the houses, there’s very few of them, look at them and compare it to anything on the bay side and you can see a huge difference as far as that’s concerned.
In many other seaside communities along the Eastern seaboard, this type of unrestricted growth has happened in places like Long Island, Newport Beach and Virginia Beach. Development of this type not only limits the enjoyment that the general public can derive from the seashore but has also prompted the fragmentation of these coastal environments since there is typically a limited emphasis on conservation. Since the National Seashore has been deemed as a nationally significant natural space, it has to enforce protective controls over its use, namely by not allowing new buildings to be built within its boundary. Francis Burling, a journalist for the Cape Codder at the time of the formation of the National Seashore, noted that it prevented “the sprawl that would soon have turned our beloved, beautiful Cape into a blowsy harridan with all kinds of flimsy constructions thrown up everywhere with the concomitant destruction of its natural beauty and beaches”[1]. For these reasons, the establishment of the National Seashore has been unquestionably influential for Cape Cod.
Temporally Anchored Management
In terms of managing the park, the NPS’s role is to maintain it “permanently preserved in its present state”, which decrees that its management should “include a mixture of resources and activities that could change but must remain comparable in character and scale to that in existence in 1961”. This is a significant part of the legislation in that it dictates how future development is to occur or not occur within the National Seashore and affects the way that assets are managed. It also situates the park within a specific spatiotemporal framework, to which all future decisions must reference to ensure that they are in keeping with the way that the park was when it was first created.
The decision to use the year 1961 as a reference point elevates that year to be the most representative of the authenticity of contemporary Cape Cod culture, in that the cultural and environmental dynamics that existed in that year must be preserved before they are lost. This is a problematic notion in some ways because it assumes that when change takes place within a community, namely by influences of modernity and capitalism, the resulting culture that emerges has lost something and is in someway less authentic, asking us to question “Should a community revert back to former cultural patterns in order to reclaim its purity instead of being able to reinvent or change existing modalities?” In my experience working as a NPS employee I paid special attention to how this temporally significant policy came into day to day decision making, to which effect I noticed none. While the average park service employee did not seem to be noticeably influenced by this policy is does raise an interesting question about how these abstract governing policies that are part of the park’s master plan, have a subtle impact on shaping the park or the visitor experience.
[1] The portrayal of the Cape as a vulnerable woman reinforces Sherry Ortner’s postulation that “women are being identified or symbolically associated with nature, as opposed to men, who are identified with culture” (1974: 73). Referring to the Cape as a ‘blowsy harridan’ conjures an image of nature as a female whose virginity needs to be protected and preserved so that other men cannot defile ‘her’ by building ‘flimsy constructions’ everywhere. This protection is now carried out by the National Park Service (NPS), which arguable projects a masculine image as a federal entity that is charged with the duty of restricting uses of the park.
