Building Histories | 33 Circuit | Oso
33 circuit avenue: Oso
A typical early 20th-century grocery store and its clerk, Paul B. Bangs
Regional grocery chains like First National and A & P came to Martha’s Vineyard in the 1920s. Before then, and for many decades afterward, Vineyarders shopped at small, independent grocery stores. At any given time in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Oak Bluffs, Edgartown, and Vineyard Haven would have had 5 or 6 such stores apiece.
John Look of Vineyard Haven ran several such stores. He had 33 Circuit built, in 1894, to house one of them: Look & Washburn Co. Novelty Market. Eli A. Lighton, the architect Look hired to design it, used a toned-down version of the “Carpenter’s Gothic” style popular in the Campground, with decorative trim and textured shingles. Like all grocery stores of its day, it used a counter-service model. Customers gave their orders to a clerk, then waited while he filled it by pulling packaged items from the shelves and scooped bulk items from crates and barrels.
John Look died in 1901 (James Washburn, his partner and son-in-law, had died in 1888), but the building remained a grocery store for many more decades. Rueben Phillips, an English immigrant who settled in Oak Bluffs ran its as Phillips Market from the 1900s through the 1920s, and it operated as the Central Market from 1937 to 1963. Phillips’ son, John, opened Phillips Hardware across the street in 1928
Stanley Brown bought the building in 1963, and ran the W. S. Brown Insurance Agency the until 1990. Batik artist and self-taught clothing designer Annie Schwenk rented, then bought, the building, turning into the third Circuit Avenue home of her clothing store Laughing Bear. Erin Tiernan, who bought the building from Schwenk in 2024, and in May 2025 opened a new clothing store, named Oso (Spanish for “bear”) in a nod to its predecessor.
Part of the Look, Washburn & Co. grocery empire, c. 1900