Edgartown firefighters were able to contain a quickly moving brush fire in Katama Friday morning March 21 despite strongly gusting winds that reached as high as 25 miles per hour and fanned the flames.
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.
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.
Bookstore owner Jon C. Nelson Jr. said he will rebuild.
“Absolutely. I am committed to rebuilding the Bunch of Grapes,” said Mr. Nelson on Sunday afternoon.
That commitment was one of the few certainties Mr. Nelson had two days after the Fourth of July fire that heavily damaged the landmark Vineyard Haven bookstore.
The face of Main street in Vineyard Haven has changed more by the act of fire than any street in any other Island town.
The town is like a Greek mythological phoenix, always turning the negative into the positive, and rebuilding bigger and better than before.
Main street in Vineyard Haven has a history of big fires. The greatest of them was the night of Aug. 10, 1883, when all of the street — 62 buildings — burned to the ground in a span of six hours. Coincidentally it was Illumination Night in Cottage City, now known as Oak Bluffs.
Island writers are expressing sympathy and sadness for the loss, they hope only temporarily, of the Bunch of Grapes Bookstore in Vineyard Haven that was devastated by fire on July 4.
As discussion continues about cleanup and a still-incomplete investigation into the July 12 Menemsha fire, the Chilmark selectmen are set to meet with spokesmen for the U.S. Coast Guard on Tuesday evening.
Tisbury firefighters quickly extinguished a fire outside 54 Main street on Sunday evening that started in a trash can behind the building. Owned by Larry Levine, the building houses the Peter Simon and Louisa Gould galleries.
The fire was first reported by Ms. Gould, who was in her gallery and smelled smoke just after 8 p.m. and called 911.
A huge fire erupted in the U.S. Coast Guard boathouse in Menemsha yesterday afternoon, completely destroying the 68-year-old building along with an extended wooden pier that leads to the west dock on the Menemsha harbor. Also destroyed in the blaze were at least one truck and an unknown number of small boats nearby. Miraculously there were no injuries save one minor injury to a volunteer fireman, a Coast Guard public affairs spokesman confirmed last night.
Chilmark firefighters quickly quelled a small fire at Blue Heron Farm early Tuesday morning. Chilmark fire chief David Norton said the call came in at 3:30 a.m. from an automatic fire alarm in the farmhouse. The fire was in the wall of the main house near a porch that had a gas grill on it. Firefighters had the fire out within a matter of minutes, Mr. Norton said. “Very small, very contained, extinguished quickly,” the fire chief said. He said the cause of the fire was the gas grill.
