David Dunlap Receives the Rose Dorothea Award
by Steve Desroches
Between the arts and sciences Provincetown has been depicted, studied, documented, captured, and preserved in pretty much every way you can think of. Paintings, photographs, academic studies, museum and archival collections, drawings, and more have all taken aspects of Provincetown and put them down for artistic purpose and posterity. But it is quite safe to say that no one has explored more nooks and crannies of the town than David Dunlap, the retired New York Times reporter who created Provincetown Encyclopedia, an exhaustive digital document that tells the history of Provincetown and its people through its built environment and includes every built structure in town, including many that no longer exist, as well as fishing vessels throughout history to now. It’s a master work that is as much about folk life as it is an authoritative and important work of historical documentation. With a journalist’s keen eye, Dunlap can go down to the minutia of a shingle or window pane in his writing, as there can be a fascinating story in the tiniest of details. The resulting document (found at ptownencyclopedia.com) is a wonderful, bottomless rabbit hole of Provincetown history.
“It’s fathomless,” says Dunlap about his work. “Every time I think I’ve hit the end of the story, it goes deeper.”
For this work and more, Dunlap is receiving the Rose Dorothea Award, an honor given annually since 2015 by the Board of Library Trustees of the Provincetown Public Library honoring someone with “a strong connection to the Outer Cape who has made a significant contribution through the written word.” Named after the famed schooner whose half-sized model resides in the Library, past recipients include Michael Cunningham, Josephine Del Deo, Sebastian Junger, Marge Piercy, Mark Doty, Karen Finley, Paul Lisicky, Frank X. Gaspar, Heidi Jon Schmidt, and Ed Miller and Teresa Parker.
Born in San Francisco and raised in Chicago, Dunlap graduated from Yale University in 1975 and then moved to New York City to work at the New York Times for 42 years until his retirement. From 1981 to 2017 he was a reporter largely covering architecture, city infrastructure, public spaces, design, monuments, and historic preservation. But he also made history when from 1994 to 1999 he covered HIV and AIDS as well as LGBTQ issues, becoming the first reporter in the Times’ history to have such topics as an official beat. Shortly before his retirement he founded the in-house Museum at The Times, as surprisingly the country’s paper of record that records so much of history had neglected its own.
“I think that my greatest contribution to the Times is the creation of The Museum at the Times,” says Dunlap. “There are very few stories I’ve written, very honestly, that are remembered except for one. That’s what happens to journalists.”
Of all the stories Dunlap filed at the Times the only one he stills hears comments about is a 2007 investigative piece he co-reported with Serge Kovaleski (the reporter who in 2015 Donald Trump mocked for his disability). They uncovered a nasty deceit by Tania Head, who also went by Alicia Esteve Head, a woman who claimed to have survived the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and went on to become the president of the World Trade Center Survivors’ Network. The only problem was she was not in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. She wasn’t even in the United States, but rather in her home city of Barcelona, Spain. As they were reporting the story, Head’s attorney loudly threatened to sue Dunlap, Kovaleski, and the Times. When Dunlap told his editor, according to Dunlap, he smiled and said, “You must be on to something. Keep going.”
Dunlap certainly knows how to keep going. The Provincetown Encyclopedia, which began in 2009 culminating in the 2015 book Building Provincetown: A Guide to Its Social and Cultural History, Told Through Its Architecture, is not his first Herculean project. In 1990 he published On Broadway: A Journey Uptown Over Time, documenting buildings along the entire length of the street, and in 2004 From Abyssinian to Zion: A Guide to Manhattan’s Houses of Worship. He was initially inspired by a book published by Moses King in the 1890s titled King’s Views of New York, which documented the city topically and with much detail. As for Provincetown, Dunlap would discover three walking tours on a visit in 1989 published by the Provincetown Historical Association and written by Josephine Del Deo and George Bryant, with illustrations by Barbara Malicoat. Packed with information, Dunlap became hyper-focused on Provincetown and the result is an invaluable history, unique in nature, that will be a landmark work available to future generations.
“The excitement I feel about the completion of the transfer to Provincetown Encyclopedia is accentuated with the awareness that it will grow,” says Dunlap. “It’s very exciting that Provincetown Encyclopedia is up and running. But there’s always more work to do.”
The Rose Dorothea Award Reading and Reception honoring David Dunlap, as part of the Provincetown Book Festival, is on Friday, September 25 at 6 p.m. at the Provincetown Public Library, 356 Commercial St. The event is free, but registration is requested. To register or for more information, call 508.487.7094 or visit provincetownbookfestival.org or provincetownlibrary.org. In addition, Dunlap will be appearing at a book event for Building Provincetown, at East End Books Ptown, 389 Commercial St., on Saturday, October 3, 5 – 6 p.m. For more information on that event call 508.413.7163 or visit eastendbooksptown.com.
