Six years after a master plan was commissioned for the Martha’s Vineyard Airport in an attempt to make an asset from an eyesore, significant changes are beginning to take shape.

 

The first tenant in a new 63-acre airport business park off Barnes Road is already on the site and, when utility lines are put in place sometime in the year ahead, other businesses are expected to move in rapidly.

 

The county commissioners have signed a twenty-year lease for the operation of the Martha’s Vineyard Airport. The decision to do so was announced by S. C. Luce Jr., chairman of the county commissioners, at the close of a public hearing in Edgartown Monday afternoon when the overwhelming sentiment of the participants was that the long term lease be signed.

 

The airfield on the central plain of Martha’s Vineyard is beginning to shape up as something more than raw earth, mud, and the destination of building materials trucked over the roads from the steamboat landing. The time has arrived, also, when the United States Navy feels that the public may know something of this project which has brought life and a strange new pattern to a domain where only the hawks, rabbits and wildflowers have dwelt for many generations.