The carousel opens for its 142nd consecutive season on Saturday, April 15, when the Martha’s Vineyard Preservation Trust will unveil panels newly refurbished by artist Margot Datz.
An old wooden powerboat from Chilmark named Souvenir is being rebuilt this winter at Gannon and Benjamin Marine Railway. Souvenir is a 32-foot wooden Brownell powerboat with a diesel engine that was built in Mattapoissett in 1962. She is getting a whole new bottom: a new keel, below the waterline planks and ribs and a fuel tank. She is powered by a five-year-old 225-horsepower Cummins diesel.
When artist Margot Datz begins a new project she finds it hard to stop. “Until someone rips me off the wall I’m there,” she said on Wednesday morning at the Old Whaling Church in Edgartown. Although no one is coming to rip Ms. Datz off the wall, her brother Stephen Datz is on hand to “help her out the door,” he said. Good thing, too, as this weekend there will be a wedding held at the church. Scaffolding and bridal gowns do not really mix. But magnificently-restored murals serving as a backdrop for wedded bliss definitely do.
Since 1843, the Old Whaling Church, with its familiar white exterior, six grand columns and regal clock tower, has stood watch over Edgartown’s Main street.
But inside the Greek revival church, built during the town’s whaling heyday, was another feature that architect Frederick Baylies viewed as an integral part of the completed project: trompe l’oeil paintings graced the walls and the ceilings, and the church’s interior architecture was built with these sweeping features in mind.
At the Gannon and Benjamin Marine Railway in Vineyard Haven, shipwrights have stepped back in regional maritime history. They are building a new 28-foot 19th-century whaleboat. The boat is one of nine being built across the country for the last remaining whale ship, the Charles W. Morgan, now undergoing restoration at Mystic Seaport. The work began a month ago. Nat Benjamin, the owner of Gannon and Benjamin boatyard, calls it a great honor to be a participant. The Charles W.
The Tabernacle cupola is undergoing the most significant restoration in more than a century. The $635,000 project will not only preserve the cupola for the years ahead, but restore its key purposes of ventilation and visual distinction.
For Russell E. Dagnall, president of the Martha’s Vineyard Camp Meeting Association, the work, called Topping off the Tabernacle, is but part of a much larger $3 million restoration of the Tabernacle that began almost 10 years ago.
A four-part, hands-on digital photo restoration class begins next week at the high school.
Participants will learn how to digitally restore and reprint damaged, fading snapshots; scan and make enlargements from negatives and slides of all sizes and formats; learn how to use Adobe Photoshop CS3 to digitally retouch and restore images; master the use of film and flatbed scanners; and make detailed enlargements for print or for the Web.
Whaling captains might feel at home today if they ventured along North Water street in Edgartown.
The street has a new look that is decidedly old. Utility poles, transformers and overhead wires are gone. And the street is lined with historic reproduction lanterns that glow softly at night.
S. Bailey Norton, a resident of the street and point man in the $3 million public-private project to bury the utilities, said this week he is extremely pleased. The project took six years to complete.
Shipwrights have installed the last plank in the Charles W. Morgan, the last wooden whaleship of the 19th century housed in Mystic Seaport in Connecticut. The wooden ship that began its 80-year career hunting whales with an Edgartown whaling captain, Thomas A. Norton, and many Vineyard crewmembers, is undergoing a $5 million restoration.
Last Friday afternoon shipwrights installed the shutter plank on the 106-foot vessel, which is expected to sail again in 2014.
It was the seventies, and Julie Robinson was 27, divorced and “trying to figure out what the heck to do with myself,” as she puts it now. “I wanted to do more with my life.”
Unfettered and newly a member of the women’s liberation movement, she drove out to California to visit a friend on her boat. “I met my husband, Dennis [White], on the boat next to ours,” she recalled, perched on a plush sofa in a back room of her business, Julie Robinson Interiors.
