Building Histories | 31 Circuit | The Arcade

31 circuit avenue: the arcade

The Arcade in the 1880s

A year after the Civil War ended, a group of six businessmen (four from the Vineyard, two from the mainland) formed the Oak Bluffs Land and Wharf Company (OBLWC). They bought 75 acres of farmland between the Methodist campground and the ocean in order to develop a secular summer resort in the area. Circuit Avenue became the dividing line between them.

The OBLWC hired a landscape architect named Robert Morris Copeland to lay out streets, parks, and house lots. The lots sold slowly at first, but by 1869, sales were booming and the company began to dream bigger dreams. Between 1870 and 1872, it paid architect Samuel Freeman Pratt to design three iconic buildings: Union Chapel, the Sea View House hotel (which burned in 1892), and the Arcade building.

The Arcade was a three-story building with a pair of shops flanking a central archway and rooms for offices or residences on the upper floors. It was designed in a Victorian Gothic style that echoed both the modest cottages of the campground and the majestic summer homes starting to appear on OBLWC lots bordering Ocean Park. The archway linked the two worlds: the vigor of Circuit Avenue on the east side, and the tranquility of the Campground to the west.

The first post office to serve what is now Oak Bluffs operated, for a time in the 1870s, out of one of the shop fronts in the Arcade building. So did the sales office of the OBLWC. William H. Pearson opened Pearson’s Drug Store in the right-hand storefront in the mid-1920s. Pearson died in 1934, but the drugstore continued under a series of different owners and names (including the “Arcade Drug Store”) through the 1970s. Like many drugstores of the era, it was best known for its soda fountain, which served sundaes, shakes, and splits at a long marble-topped counter.

Pearson’s Drugstore in the Arcade, 1920s; courtesy Chris Baer