News
After several years of declining real estate values and falling sales numbers, at last there are hopeful signs for the Island housing market. Revenue numbers for the Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank are substantially up.
Land bank executive director James Lengyel said this week he expected a 30 per cent increase in takings for the fiscal year, ending this month. The volume of sales, however, remains relatively flat.
The new Martha’s Vineyard Hospital is open for business. The freshly painted halls are bustling with medical staff, and state-of-the-art stretchers sit empty in the emergency room hallway.
And this week most of the rooms are occupied.
In 1896 William Mayhew escorted a Boston Globe reporter to Noman’s Land to meet the Butlers, the Island’s lone, rather eccentric inhabitants. Mr. Butler, after explaining that their daughter was possessed by the spirit of a Boston milliner and would often race around the house in a fit of hat trimming, conveyed the desolation of the place, perhaps as idiomatically as possible: “We don’t git any news here at this time of year ’ceptin what comes on the wind, and it’s about two months now since we’ve heard from the American Continent.
Revisions to the Massachusetts Open Meeting Law will provide the public with easier access to a wider range of documents and meeting information, but the changes are creating logistical problems for Island officials as they try to be ready before the new law goes into effect on July 1.
Among other things, under the changed law, towns will be required to post notices for all meetings in a public place that is accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Currently public meeting notices are posted on a bulletin board in most town halls.
The Union Chapel opens this Sunday with the Rev. Dr. Dorothy Watson Tatem as the guest preacher. This is her third visit and the beginning of the 140th season of Union Chapel. The chapel is located in Oak Bluffs at the south end of Kennebec and Circuit avenues. An organ prelude by Garrett Brown begins at 9:40 a.m.; the service is at 10 a.m.
Tennis and art will help raise funds for students, women and artists in Haiti through two Vineyard groups this weekend. The Fish Farm for Haiti Project will host a tennis tournament at Farm Neck, Friday through Sunday, and the PeaceQuilts organization will host a show of quilts made in Haiti.