A disastrous Independence Day fire completely destroyed the Café Moxie restaurant and left the Bunch of Grapes Bookstore badly damaged, shutting down Main street Vineyard Haven for the entire day and leaving the town, its business community and much of the Island in a state of shock at the outset of peak summer season.
But the owner of the Bunch of Grapes Bookstore promised yesterday that it would reopen.
The town of Tisbury has repossessed two small truckloads of timber left over after work on the Owen Park pier and taken home by harbor master Jay Wilbur.
The action followed a heated scene at last week’s selectmen’s meeting, in which Gene Decosta accused Mr. Wilbur of having “defrauded the town.”
Mr. Decosta accused Mr. Wilbur of having put his assistants to work at $14 an hour, pulling nails from the timber.
Tisbury’s annual street fair will not only go on despite the Independence Day fire, it will go on because of it, to help raise money for those affected.
An emergency meeting of the town selectmen Saturday morning appealed for a big turnout, and for people to come and donate.
An annual celebration of the town’s birthday, the street fair is Tuesday night.
A Fourth of July morning fire destroyed Café Moxie restaurant and severely damaged the Bunch of Grapes bookstore in Main Street Vineyard Haven.
The blaze, the biggest on the Island in years, is believed to have started in the basement of the café shortly after 9 a.m.
Owner Austin Racine was the only person in the café at the time. He said he was in the kitchen when he noticed smoke. He had earlier been in the basement, which is used for storage.
Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank executive director James Lengyel describes the 52.2-acre property acquired by the land bank this week as a microcosm of the Vineyard.
The Chappaquiddick land, he said on Tuesday, announcing the agreement which will protect it, “has open fields, rolling hills, wetlands, streams, a beach, long distance views. It’s got just about everything.”
For $3.4 million, the land bank has bought outright 3.2 acres of land from Jane Knight. It also secured a conservation restriction for another 49 acres.
Almost 3,200 buildings on the Vineyard sit on land which could be inundated by the storm surge of a category four hurricane. Even a category one storm would put almost 400 buildings at risk.
The daunting statistics come out of work done by the Martha’s Vineyard Commission, which plotted the location of structures on the Island against so-called SLOSH (Sea, Lake and Overland Surges from Hurricanes) maps from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
