Wood shingle fish houses and artist studios crowd a narrow harbor peninsula, boats tied a few feet from the walls.
What Rocky Neck looks like
A causeway from East Gloucester leads onto the peninsula, a narrow spit between Smith Cove and the open harbor. The avenue runs the length of it. Wood frame cottages and fishing shacks turned into studios stand close together along it, one and a half to two and a half storeys. The fronts are clapboard or shingle siding over stone, brick or granite foundations.
Several of the studio buildings sit directly on pilings over the water, with decks and ladders down to the mudflats. Boats moor a few feet from the walls in Smith Cove, where small craft tie up along the shoreline below the houses.
The on Rocky Neck Avenue, built around 1905, is a Colonial Revival artist's studio propped out over the cove on its own pilings. Giles Chapel on Wonson Street is a white Carpenter Gothic meeting house from 1877, with lancet windows and a steep gabled roof, now the Cultural Center.
Most of the streets are paved in asphalt, though Bickford Way and the dead end of Horton Street are not. At the peninsula's northeastern tip, the has repaired boats since 1859. The paint works that once stood on Horton Street is now a marine research facility.
Shot in Rocky Neck
The National Geographic series Wicked Tuna sends its captains out of Smith Cove, where the Hot Tuna ties up behind Madfish Wharf. The 2000 film The Perfect Storm used the Gloucester Marine Railways shipyard at the peninsula's northeastern tip, one of the oldest working shipyards in the country.
Wicked Tuna, National Geographic
Captain T.J. Ott docks the Hot Tuna behind Madfish Wharf in Smith Cove, a choice he credits to the art colony's history and its different feel from the rest of Gloucester's working waterfront. The show follows real commercial tuna crews rather than actors, so the dock on screen is the boat's actual home berth.
What Rocky Neck can double for
Monhegan Island in Maine
Monhegan Island pairs a working fishing harbor with a long running art colony, the same combination that defines Rocky Neck. Its harbor side cottages are grey, weathered shingle, close enough together to frame a narrow street the way Rocky Neck's own waterfront buildings do. Monhegan has no road access and no causeway, so any wide shot that includes a car or a paved street gives it away. Keep the frame on the shingled cottages and the water. Try searching weathered shingle fishing cottages now.
Menemsha in Chilmark, Massachusetts
Menemsha is a working fishing harbor on Martha's Vineyard with the same weathered, shingled fishing shacks and boats tied a few feet from the walls. One of its oldest shacks dates to around 1865, close to the age of Rocky Neck's own waterfront buildings. Menemsha's shacks line a single dock rather than a street grid, which a wide establishing shot will show as a different layout from the avenue and side streets here. Try searching weathered fishing shacks dock now.
Fishtown in Leland, Michigan
Fishtown in Leland is a cluster of weathered wood shanties and smokehouses built during the same early twentieth century decades as Rocky Neck's own waterfront buildings, with docks crowding the same narrow river mouth. Its fishing fleet still runs out of those same docks. Fishtown sits on a river rather than a harbor, so open ocean water or a tidal cove in the background would give away the difference. Try searching weathered wood fishing shanties now.
