Building Histories | 42 Circuit | Greene’s Block
42 circuit avenue: GREENE’S BLOCK
Greene’s Block as a Western Auto store, 1978
The two-story concrete-block building that today houses Craftworks, Sanctuary, The Lazy Frog, and one other store was built in 1910 by Hamilton J. Greene. Born in Mansfield, MA in 1850, Greene was a successful businessman who served as superintendent of the Cottage City Water Company, and represented Martha’s Vineyard in the state legislature. Commercial buildings containing multiple rentable spaces were, in the early 20th century, routinely named after their developers, and so it became known as “Greene’s Block.”
Greene’s Block stood on land that had, until 1910, been occupied by two large residential buildings. At least one of them was owned by Greene: a three-story Victorian-style inn called Dunmere Cottage. Rather than demolish two perfectly good buildings, Greene—following a long Vineyard tradition—arranged for them to be picked up and moved intact. Dunmere Cottage wound up at 7 Pennacook Avenue, where it operates today as a bed-and-breakfast under the name Dunmere-by-the-Sea.
The new building on Circuit Avenue was designed to have storefronts on the first floor and offices on the second. By the 1920s, however, Greene had turned the second floor rooms into a slightly eccentric residence for himself and his niece Elizabeth Bodfish, who became his caregiver after his wife died. Greene’s grandson Stuart MacMackin, who stayed there during summer visits as a small boy in the 1920s, remembered them as: “A cross between a shabby mansion and a shambles.”
The ground floor housed a variety of businesses over the years. In the 1920s, the four were—from left to right—a yarn shop, a specialty gift shop, Eben Bodfish’s real estate office, and Fraser’s hardware store. Fifty years later, the two right-hand shopfronts had been combined into a hardware store, and the left-hand ones into a Western Auto car-parts franchise. The passage of another half-century has brought it full circle. The building once again houses specialty shops catering to summer visitors.
Advertisement for Dunmere Cottage, moved from the Greene’s Block site