Gloucester & Rockport

Cape Ann includes two seaside towns that could hardly be more different. One is the gritty work-a-day fishing port of Gloucester, home port for The Perfect Storm. The other is swish, tidy Rockport, with its rows of fine art galleries and boutiques. In Gloucester, the Cape Ann Historical Association displays maritime art and antiques, as well as booty from the China Trade. In nearby Essex, the excellent Essex Shipbuilding Museum preserves the legacy of the village that built more two-masted wooden fishing schooners than any other place on earth. One of the last intact American fishing schooners is preserved there. Halibut Point State ...

Cape Ann includes two seaside towns that could hardly be more different. One is the gritty work-a-day fishing port of Gloucester, home port for The Perfect Storm. The other is swish, tidy Rockport, with its rows of fine art galleries and boutiques. In Gloucester, the Cape Ann Historical Association displays maritime art and antiques, as well as booty from the China Trade. In nearby Essex, the excellent Essex Shipbuilding Museum preserves the legacy of the village that built more two-masted wooden fishing schooners than any other place on earth. One of the last intact American fishing schooners is preserved there. Halibut Point State Park overlooks the sea from a granite quarry that provided the building stone for the Brooklyn Bridge and paving stones for the streets of New York and Philadelphia. Beauport is the eccentric home of an avid collector of decorative arts, whose collections included entire room interiors. He continued to expand his seaside home to accommodate these, creating a fantastic assemblage of more than 40 rooms. The owner of Hammond castle was also an avid collector, but his hunting ground was Europe, where he accumulated everything from Roman statuary to entire shop fronts from a French village, building the castle in the 1920s to house it all.

About the Expert

Juliette Rogers is coauthor of the guidebooks Eating New England: A Food Lovers Guide to Eating Locally, Secret Providence and Newport, and two Thomas Cook guides on France.