The Martha’s Vineyard Commission opened a public hearing last Thursday on a proposed 26-room hotel at 16 Chapman avenue in Oak Bluffs, where the former Ocean View Restaurant burned to the ground in 2022.

In a packed meeting room with more than 50 additional people online, property owner Charles Hajjar and his attorney, Cass Luskin, laid out detailed plans for a three-story seasonal hotel accommodating up to 72 guests from April through November, with three employee housing units in the basement.

One of the employee apartments would be be occupied year-round by the hotel manager, Mr. Luskin said, and the other two would be used in the off-season by visiting trades workers with jobs at Mr. Hajjar’s various Island properties, which include the Christopher, Richard and Sidney hotels in Edgartown and the Edgartown Inn.

The 18,543-square-foot hotel would have an outdoor pool, a fire pit, 16 parking spaces and a staff of 12 to 18 people, according to the application. Meals would be available only to hotel guests.

The Ocean View proposal has spurred resistance among neighbors in the Washington Park area of East Chop, where protest signs have been sprouting on lawns.

“This development would radically change the whole area … from a quaint Victorian style community into a bustling commercial area,” Chapman avenue residents William and Veronica Lytle wrote earlier this month, in one of more than two dozen letters the commission has received opposing the application.

While a handful of the project’s foes wrote that they would support the return of the Ocean View as a local restaurant, all of them said the proposed hotel is too large for the area.

“It is massive and out of place in a neighborhood of single-family homes,” abutters Deborah and Jim Reidy wrote.

Mr. Luskin argued Thursday that the hotel would have a smaller footprint on the ground than the former restaurant and fewer rooms than the original Ocean View House, a three-story hotel built on the site in the 1890s and later renamed Ocean View Hotel before it too burned down in the 1960s.

As designed by architect Peter Gearhart, the new hotel is meant to evoke its Victorian namesake with a mansard roof, wrap-around porch and other architectural details, Mr. Luskin said.

While Mr. Hajjar’s property is commercially zoned, the surrounding area is a residential zone of older Oak Bluffs cottages and small parks that are part of the town’s Copeland Plan District, where building projects receive additional scrutiny for potential impacts on their historic surroundings.

The disparity goes back to 1948, when Oak Bluffs first enacted zoning bylaws by town meeting vote, Mr. Luskin said.  

“This was voted as a commercial district in the original zoning, and I think because … it had been commercially used for 60 years,” he said.

The property’s zoning was challenged in 1973, Mr. Luskin said, but the Oak Bluffs zoning board of appeals rejected the argument, citing the 1948 legislative action. 

Mr. Hajjar’s initial proposal, unveiled in 2023, would have rebuilt the ground-floor Ocean View restaurant with a basement bakery and upper two floors of workforce housing. 

Mr. Hajjar later reversed his decision to restore the restaurant operation and submitted a new application for the hotel.

As part of the development, the East Chop Association has agreed to swap a 5,700-square-foot patch of land at 0 Summerfield Park, adjacent to the Chapman avenue site and formerly used as informal restaurant parking, for a 6,859-square-foot plot Mr. Hajjar owned a short distance away at 0 Off Summerfield Park.

Neighbors of the proposed hotel had to hold their fire at Thursday’s commission hearing, which was entirely taken up by the applicants’ presentation. 

But hearing officer Doug Sederholm said the public will have its say when the hearing continues August 7.

“I’m going to make sure a lot — a lot — of the time is for public testimony,” Mr. Sederholm said.

Also Thursday, the commission opened and continued a public hearing on whether to prohibit motor vehicle traffic and construction along an unpaved former cart road in Vineyard Haven.

The Tisbury planning board has nominated the stretch of Mud Puddle Way to Old Sailors Burying Ground Road, and Old Sailors Burying Ground to the burying ground itself, for designation as a special way, which would protect the route from development and motorized uses.

Parts of the old road that are now in private hands may continue to be used by their owners, but any additional uses would be prohibited if the nomination passes.

Some property owners expressed concern about the use of their land, while others said vehicle traffic is already a problem on the rutted rural way.

Tisbury fire chief Patrick Rolston said the designation would prevent the route from being improved for firefighting vehicle access to the area, but resident Lauren Evans said the houses there can be reached more readily from other roads.

The hearing is set to continue August 7.