Posted by Michael Wilson on Sat, Oct 31, 2009
Cool Pumkin
As I mentioned, Jim, our maintenance man, grew bored of winter island life. He decided to entertain himself by rooting around under the building for relics. Therefore, with fedora and bullwhip, he began his search for coins, arrowheads, old bottles etc.
We were not expecting him to find bones. Large bones. I’m no expert. I looked up the human skeletal system online and it looked to me like the thighbone. It had the L shaped knob that goes into the hip…
Jim found them sticking out of the side of the dig site and brought them to our attention. We called town hall first. In a town this small, everyone is going to know pretty soon so we might as well fess up.
Enter RED-Tape stage: Ron, the site supervisor for the construction company, agreed with us. He walked the bones over to the town hall and they told him to call the State Police. The State Police told us that they’d be right over to investigate. The newspaper photographer and reporter were here first.
Oh…by the way, we also needed to call the local tribe representative of the Wampanoags, the local Native American group. This whole affair made me a little nervous. Forget the scary bits…The fact that this street has had numerous ghost stories told about it, the phone call and bones…etc.
If the remains were human, the de/construction would have to stop until an investigation took place to everyone’s satisfaction. (I have a muddy ‘Slip ‘n slide” for the front yard of a hotel that was supposed to re-open in April. The LAST thing I wanted were delays!)
I feared for nothing. The Police sent the remains to the hospital for testing. The Wampanoag rep came and looked around. She gave us tips on what to look out for while further work took place and praised us for our diligence. Most people in these circumstances, she said, would have tossed the bones in the dumpster and kept on building. Forget the historical possibilities. She was going to call the newspaper and let them know how great we were…
What a let down this will be for some of you. The bones were not human bones said the hospital. They don’t know what they ARE, but they weren’t human. The newspaper made no mention of our historical uprightness of morality.
The digging recommenced the next morning and now all is right with the Colonial Inn world.
However, that doesn’t explain the phone call, does it? We may never know…
Posted by CJ Rivard on Fri, Oct 30, 2009
A Mysterious Phone call!
Due to the magnitude of the project of constructing the Edgartown Residence Club over that winter,
Colonial Inn Construction
we decided that we needed a maintenance man on hand to answer questions on where the water cut-off is, where the circuit breakers are, etc. He could also learn where the new installations would be for electricity and water. It would help with his maintaining of the building in the future; therefore, we asked Jim to spend the winter…
Jim is a Snowbird. He departs for warmer climes as soon as the hotel closes for the winter months. He reluctantly agreed to stay on and assigned himself tasks to keep himself busy. Intrepid Man of Maintenance that he is…he keeps busy well, but in a Curious George sort of way…forcing me to don a yellow hat to contain the wreckage. The beginning of our enigmatic events occurred while the digging underneath the porch wing was going on.
Now, a hotel closed for the off-season is a creepy place, exactly in a Jack-Nicolson-The Shining kind of way; but when you’ve emptied a wing and there are new creaks and groans from excavation, and people you don’t know wandering about constructing or de-constructing things, it gets creepier?…more creepy?…Extra creepish?
You find doors UN-locked that should be locked. You hear movements from the floors above where you didn’t think there was anyone working. But take my word for it, when you get a phone call on your office phone that your console tells you is from the abandoned wing…that tops the Casey Kasem Weekly Top Eerie.
It’s not just the fact that it’s post-season (we closed the hotel and there should be no calls from that wing). It’s the fact that we removed all the actual phones and brought them into the main building where they lie in state, still cocooned in plastic bags.
Theory: What if someone got into that wing AND brought their own phone with them just to creep us out? Plausible but for that fact that Jim…superhero of the maintenance world…removed all the phone jacks so there is nowhere to plug a phone in.
Whence came the call, I ask you? What are the odds that a practical joker would know which wires to splice a phone just to dial ‘0′?
It was all very puzzling.
Then we found the skeletal remains…
Posted by Michael Wilson on Wed, Oct 28, 2009
Construction at the Colonial Inn
Editor’s Note: Just in time for Halloween… this 3 part series is about the spooky events surrounding the 2006 construction of the Edgartown Residence Club on North Water Street, at The Colonial Inn. If you are interested in more spooky (but true) Martha’s Vineyard stories, you should check out some of the books by local writer Holly Nadler, including Haunted Island.
Once, upon a time, there was no Edgartown Residence Club! We have been operating for so long now that it is hard to remember back when it was simply the Porch Wing of the Colonial Inn. The creation of the Edgartown Residence Club involved a major restructuring project. The Porch Wing was an annex to the Inn with fifteen rooms on three different floors. The project was this: to change these fifteen rooms into six luxury suites that would be available for fractional ownership. Easy enough with an industrious crew; but the building was on sand, which means there were no true right angles left in the building. Designs drawn to shore everything up and put some beams underneath the building also included plans to replace the crawlspace underneath the entire building with a full basement.
We closed the hotel for the winter so this was the sole form of excitement for us, not to mention the entire town. (A beach town in the winter is an easily entertained entity.)
We spent the month of December in a frantic scramble to empty the hotel rooms in that wing. When you look at a hotel room, it really is more full than you realize. Stationary, ironing gear, fridge, phone, toiletries, TV, bathrobes, coat hangers, shower curtains, towel racks, pillows, bedspreads, mattresses, end tables, chairs, armoires…they all have their place and they look great where they are. However, they all take up loads of space when you take fifteen of any one of those items and put them somewhere else. In fact, they seem to grow in mass.
Now, add in the fact that the armoires weigh approximately as much as a small moon. In addition, the stairwells were too narrow to allow the armoires to leave. (They originally entered by means of a huge crane jacking them up through each floor’s porch doors, and that was how they left in the end.)
The next step was to call one of the few moving companies on the island. They sent a crew of workers who may or may not have understood a word I was saying. I had to monitor each person’s load and tell him where to put it (so to speak) on almost every trip up and down stairs. Eventually the building was empty of everything we wanted to keep. Our maintenance man, Jim, removed sinks and toilets, as well as light fixtures, mirrors, towel racks and phone jacks. It was a maintenance man’s buffet of spare parts.
Many large, loud pieces of equipment then came in, tore everything in our front courtyard out, dug twelve feet straight down and suspended the entire wing on big Jenga-like block columns. Our neighbors, who were earlier so pleased to gawk at the goings on, now turned against us. Local restaurants claimed we were driving away business, and neighbors reported that the shaking of the ground from the equipment caused stress cracks to appear in their walls. In other words, the site had been thoroughly disturbed at this point. That’s when Jim got bored and things got weird…
Posted by Joanne Sardini on Fri, Oct 23, 2009
Fall Sky by deel34
1. You HATE sunny days with temps in the low 60’s – “Give me the 90’s and humid or nothing!”
2. The only thing you hate more than that is a cool, crisp evening with a breeze blowing in the window – must have AC!
3. You can’t stand being able to walk into all the great restaurants with no reservations and still get a great table, great food and great service.
4. It drives you mad when people are friendly and helpful and can take an extra 10 minutes to show you their favorite spots to visit – you much prefer the harried and rushed service that sometimes comes with the summer crowds.
5. You always like to pay full price for everything – sales, discounts and promotional rates are not your thing at all!
6. Empty beaches are the enemy – long walks on the beach with not a soul to be seen sound boring.
7. You have no interest in learning – all the seminars, festivals and educational activities are an awful waste of time.
8. The highlight of your vacation is that 4 hour wait in the stand-by line at the ferry – it just wouldn’t be the same if you could get a reservation at the time you prefer.
9. Hustle and bustle are what you thrive on – serene views, quiet streets and a slower pace of life are hell for you.
10. Most of all – you LOVE to be stuck in traffic wherever you go – the 10 minute wait to get through 5 corners and the 20 minutes to get through the Triangle are what life is all about!
Posted by Rick Conti on Thu, Oct 08, 2009
No matter how much we love the Vineyard, there are times when it becomes so hectic that we need a break from the break we took here. Crowds, heat, and noise conspire to drive us into sensory overload thus unraveling our reasons for coming here in the first place. Edgartown, as much as I love it, is as prone to this phenomenon as any town on the Island. (Though Five Corners at unloading time still sets the standard for MV insanity.)
While genuine isolation can be found up-island, on Chappy, and a few other places even during high season, there are times when I don’t want to travel that far to escape the hustle, bustle and tussle. Fortunately, I know of the perfect outdoor oasis. I share it here at the risk of exposing my secret. (Let’s keep it to ourselves, shall we?)
Sequestered nicely between North Water Street, Summer Street, Winter Street and MainStreet, there is a block of quiet, calm and cool to be found right in the center of otherwise frantic Edgartown. Behind the shops on those streets, a grassy respite awaits the overheated, overindulged tourist.
It’s just a small park with the usual accoutrements: grass, trees, benches and brick walkways. Somehow, though, even on the steamiest of days, the shading oak trees keep this park cool and the surrounding buildings filter out the tumult of the streets.
This space has everything you’d need for a picnic… including ants. (Nothing is perfect.) My tastes, however, lean toward the decidedly more quiescent. An ice cream cone or bag of “penny” candy is the perfect repast for me while I lounge in the shade.
Birds sing in the trees, oblivious to the craziness just a few flaps of the wing away. A passing squirrel may shyly scamper by seeking his own shelter. There are no bikes to dodge or mopeds to lag behind. Just an occasional pedestrian passing through. There are no souvenirs, no food for sale – nothing to spend money on at all. In other words, it has everything I need for a fleeting vacation from my vacation.
I never linger too long in this park. Somehow, that would spoil the effect for me. I simply sit or lie on the lawn, cool down, recharge, then head out to do battle once more with the madding throng.
I require an extra long break if I’m coming from Five Corners, though.
Image by Michael Wilson.
Posted by Joanne Sardini on Thu, Oct 01, 2009
So, if you’ve been following this blog you will have read CJ’s reviews of eating on a budget on MV – she did well but I think I might have found the ultimate eat out on a budget spot – The take out van at the Artcliff Diner!!!!!
Anyone who loves breakfast food knows that the Artcliff does a stellar job on breakfast and an awesome lunch and now they have expanded into dinner fare. OK, it’s burgers and dogs but Artcliff style! With twinkle lights strung in the trees around the picnic benches and good tunes blaring out of the van it is a uniquely Vineyard experience – gourmet take out that’s affordable.
Hamburger, cheeseburger, pig sandwich, spicy pork taco and, my personal favorite, the lamb burger (with feta and caramelized vidalia onions) make up the burger menu. In this girl’s humble opinion a great burger is simple but rare – good bun? Check. Good meat? Check. Right amount of seasoning? Check!! My husband will assure you, I am not easy to please when it comes to burgers and there are very few places where I will eat one when we are out (I reason with him that it’s because the ones he makes at home are so good but it doesn’t help when we are out and I am cranky because of ANOTHER sub-par burger experience-grrr). The Artcliff has all my points covered, and all for under $8.
Then we get to the amazing Dog menu – 5 options – a Snappy Dog, a Bikini Weenie, a Green Monster, BLT & Cheese Whizz and a Hellish Relish Dog are all available and huge! A falafel offers a veggie spin and there’s something to please most right there.
Add some hand cut fries (if you are lucky the truffle fries with parmesan will be on the specials) and a soda and we successfully ate for $21 for 2 of us (we share the fries – 1 portion is enough for 2 people).
Desserts are another must do here! Nutella or Apple Cinnamon Donuts are fried up while you wait and served with a generous drizzle of either Chocolate syrup or caramel sauce. At just $5 it seems rude to leave them behind and again, one portion will feed two, unless you are really hungry!
Now only serving on weekends from 5-midnight through the end of October (weather and business permitting) it is a gem that you must discover, if not this year then definitely next summer.
Image courtesy of Joanne Sardini.