West Tisbury Town Hall Wins Makeover

By IAN FEIN

When Sandy Fisher walks into the West Tisbury town hall, she says the ladies' room smells exactly like it did when she went to school there about 40 years ago.

"It's probably the original mold," she said this week.

Sometime soon, however, the bathrooms will begin to smell different, as the 134-year-old building is set for a dramatic $3.7 million makeover.

On Tuesday a record number of town voters said yes to the renovation project 1,074 to 577 at a special town election. The Proposition 2 1/2 override question needed a simple majority to pass. Voters also approved the project at a special town meeting last week.

"I didn't think it was going to do it," town hall building committee chairman Ernest Mendenhall said after the final vote was tallied late Tuesday night. "I was not convinced heading into today."

The road to a new West Tisbury town hall has been long and at times bumpy. In a way, the town has been wrestling with the project since the 1970s. The building originally housed the Dukes County Academy, and was converted to a town hall in 1977.

Built in 1870 with a price tag of $8,000, the Dukes County Academy served as a private school for about 25 years before becoming public. The academy association kept ownership of the building, and leased it to the town for another half-century, before finally gifting the property to the town in the late 1940s.

In the early 1970s West Tisbury selectmen formed a committee to explore options for the future of the building. The committee briefly discussed creating a community center, and later was approached by the Martha's Vineyard National Bank, which showed interest in leasing the ground floor for a West Tisbury drive-in and walk-in branch.

But the late Fred S. Fisher Jr., Sandy's father and the former finance committee member and selectman, offered the most controversial proposal. He suggested the town use the building as a drill for the fire department, and burn it to the ground.

At a November 1975 special town meeting, voters decided not to raze the historic structure, but then rejected an expenditure of $4,600 to explore two architectural designs that would have transformed the building into town offices. At the time the cost of the renovation was estimated between $75,000 and $90,000.

Mr. Fisher said he could not see spending so much money "on that damned old shack."

At another special town meeting two months later, voters approved three separate articles appropriating $11,000 for minor renovations that were mostly cosmetic. Some voters opposed spending money on paint.

Because of the lack of funding, police chief George Manter - who briefly used the building as the town police department after the school moved out and before the town offices moved in - voluntarily did much of the remodeling and carpentry himself.

Much of Mr. Manter's handiwork still holds the building together today. Since the 1970s only minor changes have been made, except for a new roof that was installed in 1998.

"Under the cover of darkness," according to one newspaper account, on a late Sunday night in July 1977, the town offices moved into the old school, and the police department moved into the old town offices on Mill Brook Pond.

At the time, John Alley, who served his first year as selectman in the old town offices, explained the need for the move: "When the town grows, so do the file drawers."

This week, Mr. Alley said much the same thing about the need for new renovations. Between 1970 and 2000, the population of West Tisbury increased from 453 to 2,487 - making it the fastest growing community in the commonwealth.

Mr. Alley served as a selectman for 27 years, graduated from the school in 1951, and has lived across the street from the town hall building for 58 years.

"I perhaps have the best view of the entire project," he said from his State Road home on Thursday. "And really if you look at something for 60 years you become used to it. I think people will tell you that they're skeptical of change. But if [the building committee] does a good job, the change will soon be accepted by the people of the town."

Mr. Alley admitted the building will lose some of its character and charm. In 1977, when he and police Sgt. Jeffrey (Skipper) Manter removed the old heating ducts, they found love notes written in the fifties. They also uncovered a blackboard that still had an assignment from 1938 written in chalk.

Mr. Manter, whose class photo hung on the walls of town hall when his mother, Janice, served as executive secretary, also has a unique perspective on the building. As a young sergeant he worked under his father in the makeshift police department on the ground floor, where he now sits as a selectman and once played dodge ball during rainy days as a child.

As the only member of the town hall building committee who went to school there, Mr. Manter said he will strive to maintain the building's historic features, such as the blackboards still visible in the old classrooms on the second floor.

Three current town hall employees also went to school in the building - town clerk Prudence Whiting, planning board administrator Simone De-Sorcy and zoning board of appeals administrator Julie Keefe. All three are excited about the prospect for new offices, but fond childhood memories linger.

"Obviously the gut familiarity of it will be changed somewhat, but it's not as if we're leveling the building. The same wonderful windows will be there, with the same amount of light flooding in," Mrs. Keefe said this week. "Ultimately it's all in your mind anyway; you can retain it there."

For the last six years Mrs. Keefe has worked in the same room where she started school about 50 years ago. She sits today in nearly the same spot that her teacher, Priscilla Fisher, once sat.

"Sometimes I think I'm Mrs. Fisher," she admitted. "Whenever anyone who went to school here comes by for town business they comment on it. And, oddly enough, no matter what the age group, we all remember having gym downstairs.

"We had wonderful recesses here - the best in the world," Mrs. Keefe said. "We just had boundless energy. We played so hard."

Some town hall employees, reveling in the override victory, said they were so eager for the renovations to start that they were already packing their bags Wednesday morning. But a lot of work remains before construction begins.

"I'm ecstatic, and I want to pack up my office, too," Mr. Mendenhall said Wednesday, a bright painting of the proposed new town hall hanging above his desk. "But, unfortunately, now's where the work really begins. I'm glad we've got to this point, but now we've really got to buckle down," he said.

Voters have approved funding and conceptual designs for the project, but all the specifics still must be determined. Mr. Mendenhall said the building committee will hold at least one more public meeting in the coming months to discuss issues of concern.

He said it will likely take a few months for the committee to complete the plans, and he hopes the project will be ready to go out to bid by February 2005.

Sometime after that, the moldy bathrooms will be torn down, and Sandy Fisher's scents will be just memories.

Asked whether the building will lose some of its character without the smelly bathroom, Mrs. Fisher replied:

"No, I won't miss that. I just hope it doesn't leak."