Spiritus Pizza

About this place Spiritus Pizza

Spiritus Pizza occupies a unique position in the Provincetown social ecology that has no precise equivalent anywhere else in American gay life. It is a pizza counter — a good one, serving pizza by the slice and soft drinks — but its actual function from around midnight to 2am throughout the summer season is as the main social gathering point of Commercial Street after the bars close. The stretch of Commercial Street in front of Spiritus becomes, in the late-night hours, the place where everyone ends up: people who have come from the A-House, people who have come from the Crown & Anchor, people who have been at the Boatslip all afternoon and have simply been moving up and down Commercial Street ever since. The scene in front of Spiritus in the late 1970s and 1980s was famous across the American gay world — a particular combination of food, cruising, socialising, and the specific energy of a small town that has been running at full capacity all day and is now winding down into the small hours. The tradition has persisted across four decades of changing social mores and the availability of apps that might be expected to replace the sidewalk cruising function. Spiritus remains because it serves a social need that technology has not replaced: the experience of being physically present in a crowd of your community, late at night, on a summer street.