The Vineyard Playhouse hopes to raise $1 million this summer in the first phase of a $5 million capital campaign that encompasses the renovation, restoration and expansion of the historic theatre on Church street in Vineyard Haven.
The restoration already has begun. With Community Preservation Act funds and private donations, the playhouse has installed new wood clapboard siding and windows on three sides of the building, and a new fire-safety sprinkler system.
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.
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.
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.
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.
