Commentary
A Weapon to Defend Island Waters
The days slip by, one after another. First a hundred, then a thousand, then thousands more. The cesspool keeps leaking. The septic system isn’t repaired. The one-bedroom, one-toilet cottage is transformed into a three-bedroom, two-toilet home. And the quality of the water in Sengekontacket Pond continues to decline.
The solution to the problems facing our great ponds is so simple that I can hear the slapping of foreheads as I write this — the Martha’s Vineyard Clam Club. Why not? If we’ve got clubs for folks to chase tiny balls and produce nothing better than figures on a scorecard, can’t you imagine a club where folks scour our ponds to produce a tasty meal? The problem is that clamming doesn’t have panache. Well it does, among a select few, but not the right select few. We need a CCC — a Celebrity Clamming Corps.
Return to Tivoli Day
The town of Oak Bluffs, planning a new celebration at the end of summer in 1978, turned to its own history and took the name of Tivoli from the community arcade building that was the pride of the town and the center of its nightlife at the lively turn of the century. Since 1978, Tivoli Day has taken root as a favorite celebration in the afterglow of the Labor Day holiday, a festive landmark placed squarely at the intersection of Island summer and fall.
The Public Park that Never Happened
For two decades, so-called Boch Park on Beach Road in Vineyard Haven has sat in a limbo made of court battles and subsequent, drawn-out negotiations between the Boch family and the town of Tisbury.
The scruffy condition of the parcel, which overlooks Vineyard Haven harbor, is a sad and continuing testament to a failure to reach resolution on what could be one of the bright spots of the town waterfront.
50 Years Ago
From the Vineyard Gazette editions of September, 1957:
TEAR IT DOWN
Editors, Vineyard Gazette:
A building permit is given to an individual in 2003, to construct a garage to replace an existing 200-square-foot garage. The proposed cost for the replacement garage was to be $22,000. Instead, the project grew to a three-story building with balconies, sliding glass doors and a roof deck. The cost probably exceeded $200,000.
My questions are:
Why must this saga continue?
Wasn’t the present garage built illegally in the first place?