Building Histories | 20 Circuit | Eastaway
20 circuit avenue: eastaway
Postcard showing the Pawnee House (left) and Metropolitan House (right)
Oak Bluffs, incorporated as Cottage City in 1880, is the only planned town on Martha’s Vineyard. The other towns on the Island grew organically over several centuries, but Oak Bluffs designed and built, in the third quarter of the 19th century, as a summer resort. By the 1880s, it had a dozen big resort hotels. Two of the largest faced Circuit Avenue, flanking Park Street (now Healey Square): the Metropolitan House on the right, and the Pawnee House on the left.
The Pawnee House was built in the 1870s, when Oak Bluffs (then known as Cottage City) was still part of Edgartown. It faced Circuit Avenue and stretched across an entire block, its back door opening onto Kennebec Avenue. It attracted guests who, summer after summer, booked rooms for multiple weeks, a month, or even the entire season. The price of a room included three meals a day, served in the spacious dining room on the first floor, and bands played on the second-floor balcony on summer evenings.
The hotel’s glory days were behind it when it was sold, in 1935, to corporate owners. After operating it for a year, they closed its doors in 1936, and it remained shuttered until the end of World War II. An ad in the Vineyard Gazette in the spring of 1946 announced its reopening “for this season and many seasons to come,” and touted two floors of fully remodeled rooms, upgraded plumbing, and a cafeteria-style dining room, and a new parking lot in the rear.
Even with these changes, however, the Pawnee remained a relic of a now-vanished era. Unable to attract enough summer visitors to keep it open as a hotel, the owners demolished the three upper floors in the mid-1950s and converted the first floor into retail space. Today the Pawnee House restaurant, on the Kennebec Avenue side remembers the grand hotel it once was.
The Pawnee House in the 1890s