Building Histories | 24 Circuit | Basics

24 circuit avenue: Basics

Poster for a hootenanny (open-mic night) at the Moon-Cusser; courtesy UMass Amherst Special Collections

The single-story, brick-front building that houses 24 Circuit Avenue is new by Oak Bluffs standards. It was built in the late 1940s: more than a century after the first tents were pitched in what is now the Methodist campground, and seventy-five years after the Oak Bluffs Land and Wharf Company built the Arcade building across the street.

Once a grand hotel, the four-story Metropolitan House, stood on the site, facing Circuit Avenue and stretching back all the way to Kennebec Avenue. Like its Circuit Avenue neighbors the Island House, the Pawnee House and the Oakwood House, the Metropolitan was a sprawling four-story wooden structure: a home away from home for visitors who returned summer after summer.

The day of the big resort hotels had passed by the end of World War II, and when fire destroyed the Metropolitan House in 1945, it was replaced by a single-story brick block housing retail spaces and Oak Bluffs’ first purpose-built post office.

The space that is now Basics held a grocery store for a time, but in the spring of 1963 it was vacant. David Lyman, manager of the Unicorn Coffee House in Boston, rented the space, covered the walls with burlap and salvaged barn boards, and opened a summer coffee house he called Moon-Cusser. Like its counterparts on the mainland, the Moon-Cusser used live music to draw in customers. Nationally known folk singers like Tom Rush, Jim Kweskin, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, and the Clancy Brothers headlined there, and local amateurs performed at its weekly open-mic events. Carly Simon honed her skills there, singing with her sister Lucy as “the Simon Sisters.”

The Moon-Cusser was open only in the summer, and lasted for only three seasons (1963-1965), but, along with the Unicorn Coffee House in Oak Bluffs and Café Moskva in Vineyard Haven, it established the Vineyard as a musical hotspot.