As Lee Jackson Van Allen peered over the railing of a second-floor balcony at her family cottage on Wayland Avenue on a recent fall afternoon, she reflected on the history of the home in Oak Bluffs and the view in front of her.
The park and harbor before Van Allen on that day was not so different from the landscape her mother, Doris Pope Jackson, had gazed upon when she bought the home in 1948.
But the Island, as a whole, has changed, as development becomes increasingly geared toward seasonal visitors and more year-round Islanders are priced out of the housing market. And when the Martha’s Vineyard Commission (MVC) narrowly approved a hotel to be built directly in front of Van Allen’s home, she worried that the three-story building would block the view her family’s witnessed for more than 75 years.
“It will affect our lives forever — our historic community forever,” she told The Times.
The Ocean View Hotel, proposed by Boston-based commercial developer Charles R. Hajjar, was approved by the MVC late last year. But in the neighborhood it’s proposed in, the project needed another approval: one from a much smaller district board, which takes the cultural appropriateness of proposals into account in decision-making.
And in a divergence from the norm, that cultural district board, the Copeland Plan Review Committee, went over the MVC approval and denied the proposal in October. The decision essentially stalls any progress on the project, at least for now.
Typically, even a narrow approval by the MVC holds weight at subsequent town boards. But the decision does point to an ever-present conflict that faces Islanders, regional planners, and developers of whether or not the year-round community is in favor of new construction that’s geared only toward seasonal visitors.
More than 60 percent of homes on the Vineyard are seasonally owned. And the affordability gap between the average income of an Island resident and the cost to purchase a home, in a booming local housing market, grows every year.
The Ocean View Hotel was proposed in the middle of the Copeland District, a neighborhood known for its historic homes. The district spans roughly 75 acres between Circuit Avenue and the Nantucket Sound, and was laid out in the mid-19th century by architect Robert Morris Copeland when the town was newly geared toward tourists and a seasonal economy.
The buildings of the district feature Victorian and Carpenter Gothic architecture, which has roots in European stone buildings but is made of wood. The architecture often features design markers like scalloped gingerbread trims, pointed-arched windows, and one-story verandas, such as Van Allen’s balcony.
The Copeland District is one of six districts of critical planning concern in Oak Bluffs. These districts are designated by the MVC and have been protected since 1991. Each district has its own set of zoning regulations and processes.
Any new construction in the Copeland District has to go through a strict approval process that takes proximity to parks, viewscape blockages, and the historic roots of the area, which trace back to the Oak Bluffs Methodist camp meetings during the 19th century, into consideration. The hotel needed approval from the Copeland Plan Review Committee, a six-person hyper-local group that reviews the appropriateness of projects proposed in the district and evaluates them based on how they fit into the existing neighborhood.
Hajjar and abutters, like Van Allen, presented at four hearings in front of that board, and on Tuesday, Oct. 13, the Ocean View Hotel was found by members of the committee to be not appropriate for the district and was denied in a 3-to-1 decision. Not all members were present at the meeting.
To continue to move forward with the permitting process, Hajjar will have to reapply with a new plan or appeal the decision.
“We believe the hotel fits the district, and we are reviewing our options. We remain committed to bringing a historic hotel back to this site,” Hajjar told The Times two weeks after the denial, on Oct. 27.
Hajjar, who owns several boutique hotels in Edgartown, including the Edgartown Inn and the Richard, purchased the land in 2023 after a fire demolished the previous building, the Ocean View Restaurant, in 2022. The restaurant was a one-story building and didn’t block Van Allen’s, or her neighbor’s, second-story view.
Hajjar originally planned to create housing, but changed his proposal to a hotel soon after.
The parcel of land housed a hotel in the late 19th century, constructed during a boom of resorts built to accommodate new waves of tourists. Hajjar said he designed his new building in line with the character of the original structure. (That structure also burned down.)
“The site is in Oak Bluffs’ Copeland District, which exists to protect the neighborhood’s Victorian character,” Hajjar stated in a text. “We designed the hotel with that purpose in mind, in the tradition of the hotel that came before it.”
The Ocean View was proposed as a 26-room, three-story hotel spanning more than 18,500 square feet. It featured three employee housing units in the basement and a hotel bar and restaurant limited to hotel guests, and was slated to absorb part of an adjacent parking lot.
Hajjar stated to The Times that his proposed design aligned with the zoning in the town as well as the past iteration of the hotel, which the MVC debated during their review that ended in a split 8–7 final vote. In terms of viewscape and architectural design, however, the MVC found the Ocean View Hotel fit into the Copeland District when considering other developments that could be proposed in its place. A Victorian-style hotel, they wrote in their decision, was better than other potential futures, though there were no other proposals for the parcel.
“In the wake of the destruction of the Ocean View Restaurant by fire in 2022, a wide range of prospective commercial structures other than a Victorian-style hotel could be erected on the site, and while subject to Copeland Plan Committee review, these potentially could be less stylistically in accord with the neighborhood and could be more impactful,” the MVC decision states.
But, over the course of four hearings, the majority of Copeland Plan Review Committee members cited the architectural design, viewscapes that would be affected, and hugeness of the proposed hotel as reasons for the denial.
Board chair Gail Barmakian said that the new proposal was too dissimilar to the older renderings and photographs. She said the Copeland District is “all about community” and “about being in harmony with where you are.”
“I’m seeing this as a new structure,” she said of the Ocean View Hotel and its comparison to the 19th-century version. “I don’t find it appropriate.”
Barmakian cited architecture, siting, and massing, which refers to the general shape and size of a structure, as her main concerns with the Ocean View Hotel. And the majority of the board agreed with her.
The parcel of land the Ocean View Hotel was proposed on, though surrounded by residential lots with historic homes, is zoned as a business lot, which raised complications on Oct. 13.
“Some of the tension that we’re dealing with is that we’ve got a B1 lot surrounded by residentially zoned lots,” Hajjar’s representation, Cass Luskin, said at the meeting. “That tension is not peculiar here. It’s not strange. It’s not a reason for the plans to be changed, altered, diminished. That tension is the tension inherent in these Oak Bluffs developments … The design meets zoning. The design is for a Victorian hotel on the location where a Victorian hotel had stood for more than 60 years.”
He added that he adjusted the proposal during the MVC’s review to remove a pool and fire pit and turned the structure to reduce the impact on the Van Allen home.
“We’ve gone through quite a few versions of this in order to try and accommodate and minimize the impact that it’s going to have on the folks who already live there. But at the end of the day, it is a B1 lot,” Luskin said.
Copeland Plan Review Committee member Scott Slarsky agreed with Luskin and Hajjar’s claim that the hotel fit in with the district and its history.
“The Ocean View Hotel clearly exhibits the Victorian style of architecture prevalent within this district at the turn of the 19th century, specifically targeting the date of 1900,” Slarsky said.
When it came down to a vote, however, concerns about the proposed Ocean View Hotel on the viewscapes and character of the district were more significant than support for the project.
“Its impact on the character of the community as well as the viewscapes, it’s just too much,” committee member Shelley Christiansen said.
For Van Allen, the view from her balcony on Wayland Avenue holds the memory of multiple generations of homeowners. The cottage is the second in Van Allen’s family to commemorate that legacy; Shearer Cottage, on Morgan Avenue in Oak Bluffs, is the first. Shearer Cottage is the oldest African American–owned inn on Martha’s Vineyard, purchased by Charles Shearer, a formerly enslaved man and Van Allen’s great-great grandfather.
Through the seasons in the last 60 years since her mother built the balcony, many landmarks have remained the same — the glistening harbor with boats secured to moorings, historic cottages, and oak trees standing tall in the park.
Van Allen, though not part of the Copeland Plan Review Committee, told The Times that she opposed the Ocean View Hotel through letters and advocacy to protect the next generation of homeowners in her family.
“The Island has to start watching and paying close attention to development,” Van Allen said. “We have to make a stand and say we are going to preserve some of our historic neighborhoods, so they can be there for our children and grandchildren to enjoy in the future.”
