Rocky Neck Guest House

Trail Site #3 : Rocky Neck Guest House, 1 Eastern Point Road

DIRECTIONS: Return to the corner of East Main Street and Rocky Neck Ave. The Rocky Neck
Guest House is across the street on the south western corner of Rocky Neck Avenue. 

This guesthouse was visited by Theresa Ferber Bernstein (1890-2002) and William Meyerowitz (1887-1981) following their marriage in 1919. They had met two years earlier in New York, when Meyerowitz, along with Robert Henri and George Bellows, was involved in the People’s Art Guild, an organization that sought to bring art to the poor in New York’s East Side settlement houses. Bernstein had been identified as someone who would be sympathetic to the cause.

Bernstein began coming to Gloucester in 1916, when she stayed at Pilgrim House, a Rocky Neck guesthouse popular with artists, and exhibited at the Gallery-on-the-Moors. In the years following their stay at the Guest House, Bernstein and Meyerowitz rented a cottage in Folly Cove and then, in 1924, bought 44 Mt. Pleasant Avenue, where they entertained such friends as Stuart Davis, Marsden Hartley, Rafael Soyer, Edward Hopper, Leon Kroll, Umberto Romano, and Milton Avery. Bernstein and Meyerowitz held art classes and were actively involved in the art communities in both New York and Gloucester. They summered in Gloucester until they died (Bernstein just two weeks shy of her 112th birthday).

Both artists were integral to the Gallery-on-the-Moors as well as the founding of the North Shore Arts Association, the Gloucester Society of Artists, and the Cape Ann Society of Modern Artists.