Cape Cod Shacks, Home to Literati, Ruled Historic but May Be Razed

Seventeen rustic shacks on the outer dunes of Cape Cod could still be ripped down even though the huts, which provided soul-searching solitude to Eugene O’Neill, Jack Kerouac and other creative minds, have won national historic designation.

The National Park Service on Friday placed the primitive huts on the National Register of Historic Places at the urging of the Massachusetts Historical Commission.

Park Service officials in Boston previously had maintained that the shacks located on the Cape Cod National Seashore did not have the architectural or historic value to warrant preservation. The service had indicated the shacks would be demolished after leases with the current owners expire.

Herbert Cables, regional director of the Park Service in Boston, said earlier this year that a historic designation “affords no guarantee of protection.”

“The National Park Service could raze these shacks. There’s still potential for that to happen,” said Edie Shean-Hammond, a Park Service spokeswoman in Boston.

But she said regional officials vowed in December that all of the huts would be preserved until plans for the area have been completed.

The one- and two-room gray shingled beach huts lie between Truro and Provincetown near the tip of Cape Cod. Built in the 1920s and 1930s by the Coast Guard as shelters, they offer none of the conveniences of modern life, such as electricity and plumbing.

Preservationists say the shacks have been used by O’Neill, Kerouac, poet E. E. Cummings, author Norman Mailer and scores of lesser-known painters, poets, playwrights and novelists.