HOLLY NADLER

508-274-2329

(hollynadler@gmail.com)

It’s heartwarming to see work on the Ocean Park bandstand (some call it the gazebo) progressing. For years now town officials have discussed revamping it — an important consideration when you climb the steps inside and hear your footsteps crunch on the rotting boards like the sound effects in a scary movie.

For a long time fund-raising for the fix-up lurched along in the fits and starts that the verb “lurch” implies. Still, that miracle of miracles happened —– money (remember money?) materialized and, lo and behold, the bandstand is getting its long-overdue facelift.

What a lot of people don’t know about our most posh part of town — the nine seaside acres that make up the bandstand, the park and the semi-circle of high-end real estate — was that back in the 1880s and 1890s it was even more phantasmagorically fantastical than it is today.

For one thing, you know the Norton house — the olive green job with its gables, turrets, beveled, stained and bejeweled glass, a look-a-like for the Addams family manse if Martha Stewart had been allowed to apply some dainty touches? Well, all the homes surrounding Ocean Park were at one time similarly fancy. Those were the days, don’t forget, when people asked themselves, why have two bay windows when you can have five, or 50 yards of gingerbread filigree when you can tack on so much that only a few square inches of the house itself show through?

Also, there was something about those supposedly uptight Victorians which caused them to decree, “Okay, if we’re going to wear corsets and have sex only twice a year, let’s go a little nutsy with the holiday atmosphere!” One festive feature was that everyone hung bunting. Bunting, apparently, was little triangles of cloth strung together from rooftops and porch eaves and sometimes, on special occasions, flapping all the way from the manor houses to the bandstand. Also, an orchestra called the Foxborough Brass Band used to play full-time on a pavillion erected along the bluffs. Another band tootled and sawed away for passengers gliding down the wharf and into the gilded, high-ceilinged public rooms of the five-story Sea View Hotel (not the present condominiumized Sea View, but a monster Victorian hostelry anchored by twin towers, dark green with red trim).

Alongside this hotel, where the much less prepossessing Sovereign Bank stands today, an immense dance hall called the Tivoli, an orange and lavender Queen Anne palace, reared up alongside another enormous Victorian cavern housing a skating rink. And if all this architectural folderol wasn’t enough, the township also contained a train line called the Limited, looping in and out from Edgartown.

In the early 1890s, a series of arson-based fires brought an end to the Sea View and some of the other grander buildings around town. The Tivoli and the skating rink had an appointment with Samarra and the wrecking ball, plus in the first half of the 20th century, arbiters of taste deemed Victorian towers, turrets, gables, cornices, finials, and all other manner of frills were cheesier than Texas toast. All the homes that once looked like the present day Norton house (the Norton house included) turned into flat-roofed, aluminum sided, jigsaw-scroll-denuded rooming houses. Most of the pretty 19th century stuff you see nowadays has been reinstated in the past few decades.

No more bunting, however, no more brass bands, and no more greased pig races, but that’s another story . . .

The Oak Bluffs Public Library has developed a program called, winningly enough, Wicked Fun Games, for ages 12 to infinity, to take place on Saturday, Oct. 31, from 12:30 to 2 p.m. Kids will play Nintendo Wii, Sports Resorts, Mario Kart and other great games. A selection of award-winning board games will also be available to play, and refreshments will be served; all this fabulousness to take place in the meeting room.