Martha's Vineyard

A Design/Build Breakthrough

June 27, 2022 by John Abrams 1 Comment

For many years South Mountain has engaged in master planning and conceptual design efforts for island non-profits – Martha’s Vineyard Community Services, MV Museum, Island Grown Initiative, The MV Public Charter School, Featherstone Center for the Arts, The Nature Conservancy, and others.

But when these organizations moved from planning to design and construction, our design/build commitment (we don’t build what we don’t design and we don’t design what we don’t build) left us out in the cold. Non-profit Boards of Directors, with a fiduciary responsibility to their donors and organizations, generally feel that the conventional project delivery method – i.e., architecture firm designs, builders submit competitive construction bids, and a contract is awarded – is the only viable path. Our design/build method (architecture and construction by the same company) contradicts their allegiance to the perceived financial efficiency of the traditional approach. Even though some board members are attracted to the potential efficacy of single entity responsibility, it’s understandable that they would be concerned about eliminating the financial control of a competitive bid process. This has been a tough obstacle to overcome.

The Breakthrough came in 2017 when we were helping Camp Jabberwocky plan renovations. Camp Jabberwocky is the oldest sleep away camp in America for people with disabilities. It’s a magical place where dreams come true and nothing is impossible. It’s been that way for 65 years.

The main building on their campus needed major change. After some initial programming work, we spoke to their board about the possibility of hiring SMCo for architecture and construction services. The same old problem surfaced. Not long before, we had been hired to develop a schematic design for the new Martha’s Vineyard Museum and had been disappointed when they elected not to accept design/build for the next phases.

This time, we had an idea.

We developed an important clause to add to our design agreement. Essentially, it said that:
• At the completion of design we would prepare a detailed cost estimate for construction.
• Then Camp Jabberwocky could elect to hire an independent professional estimator to provide a comparative estimate.
• If the independent estimator’s construction estimate was close to, or higher, than ours, the construction contract would automatically be awarded to us.
• If it was more than 5% lower, there would be a reconciliation process to assess the reasons for the differences and reach agreement on a final price.
• If the parties were unable to agree, Jabberwocky could use our plans to get bids from other construction companies.

This suggestion breached the dam; we signed a construction contract, and the project was built. Since then, two other boards – Martha’s Vineyard Community Services (MVCS) and Island Grown Initiative (IGI) – have agreed to this approach for major projects. The result: three of the most rewarding endeavors in our history.

It’s notable that by the time we completed the Jabberwocky design, enough trust had been built that their board decided to forego the comparative estimate opportunity and directly engage SMCo for construction.

MVCS is the island’s umbrella social service agency; it provides an array of services to thousands of islanders each year. Just after the Jabberwocky project was completed, we created a master plan to replace the dilapidated and insufficient MVCS buildings – to make a new campus – and completed the design for their Early Childhood Center, the first phase of the campus re-build. Their board took a more conservative approach and hired an outside estimation firm, whose pricing turned out to be higher than ours. They signed our construction contract, and we completed the project on time and on budget in 2021. The organization and the families the building serves could not be happier. We begin design of phase two this fall.

Meanwhile, we will soon complete design for a new Education and Innovation Center, three units of staff housing, and extensive infrastructure improvements at IGI’s Island Grown Farm. When we complete our construction estimate in the fall, we do not know how the board will proceed. Either way (the Jabberwocky way or the MVCS way) works for us.

One way or another, we are thrilled by the prospect of building this project, about which longtime land planner and sustainability advocate Rob Kendall recently wrote in the Vineyard papers, as public permitting hearings proceeded at The Martha’s Vineyard Commission (MVC), “This is a gift from the Island community to itself. The plan has the long-term educational potential to move the island closer to a more sustainable food and energy future.”

We are looking forward to IGI construction, to MVCS Phase Two, and to more of this mission-driven institutional work in the future. Using SMCo’s integrated design/build approach, we are bringing high performance and high-quality development to a sector we respect and organizations we cherish. This trilogy of exemplary projects embodies our values and allows us to contribute to and synergize with our community in a very public way. Our staff loves the opportunity to explore different building types and scales, new ways to practice our craft, and the purpose and meaning embedded in this work. We are humbled by the great work these organizations do and proud of our modest contributions to their success.

And it’s all because we stopped seeing our approach as an obstacle, gave up
trying to convince boards to take us on faith, listened carefully to their concerns, and devised a way to alleviate them. There are lessons here: saying no to no is valuable, finding the heart of an impasse can inspire innovation, and making minor method adjustments can produce major harvests.

In this case, a simple solution caused a quantum leap.

On Building Second Homes

February 1, 2022 by John Abrams 4 Comments

This piece was written for and published in Fine Homebuilding. Thanks to Kevin Ireton (former FH editor) for the idea and his stellar editing. As always, he held my feet to the fire.

“How can you justify devoting so much time and energy to building vacation homes for rich people?”

It’s a good question,and one that I’ve heard often during my nearly 50 years on Martha’s Vineyard. In resort communities, many don’t have a first home. They’re scrambling to find stable housing while more than half the houses sit empty much of the year. That’s a problem. And in light of our climate crisis, the significant materials and energy dedicated to building and operating those houses compounds the problem.

When I came here in the 1970s, designing and building homes was so thrilling that I was content to build anything that developed new skills and knowledge. Working with head and hands gave me great pleasure; the idea that people would pay me to do it felt like a bonus. After a few years, however, the joy of the work and the satisfaction of the results were no longer enough. By then second homes had become a staple of our company, South Mountain, and my colleagues and I began to ask ourselves how we could justify this work.

The answer came in 1980. It began with a phone call from a woman named Madeline, who asked if I would look at a piece of land with her. She was a 60-year-old librarian whose husband had recently died. They had no children, and they had always lived in rented apartments. Her dream was to own property. She had $7,000 in cash. A realtor showed her a lot priced at exactly that, but her friends advised against buying it due to its topography and location.

The steeply sloping parcel was adjacent to the main road from Vineyard Haven to Edgartown. Traffic on the road was noisy and constant. The property faced due south toward a beautiful little valley. Except for the proximity to the road, it was lovely. I suggested an earth-bermed, partially underground house and told her we could design the noise of traffic right out of the picture. She was excited. She bought it.

At about the same time, I was approached by a single mother who owned property in West Tisbury and wondered whether we could build a house she could afford. Her budget was too small, but we had heard that the Farmer’s Home Administration was providing 1% loans to those with low and moderate income. We hoped to bundle a nice passive-solar house for Cathy and the earth-bermed house for Madeline, though the Farmer’s Home fixed-expenditure cap did not take into account either the Vineyard’s high construction costs or the long-term energy savings our houses would realize. We applied anyway.

We created plans for simple, compact houses and submitted them to Farmer’s Home with a request that they raise the mortgage limit (from $40,000 to $48,000) on each house due to the energy savings, which we analyzed and documented. After some bureaucratic wrangling, the increase was approved. Unfortunately, it still wasn’t enough to build the houses, unless we cut our overhead and profit to nothing and reduced our labor rates to below cost. Additional subsidies were needed.

Enter David and Pat Squire, who had purchased land in Edgartown and designed a second home with a Boston architect. They asked if we would be interested in bidding on the construction, and I told them that South Mountain built only those projects that we designed and that we didn’t bid on construction projects. They persisted, and a radical thought occurred to me: What if we gave the Squires a bid that had an explicit “premium” built in to subsidize the two Farmer’s Home houses? I shared the idea with the Squires, and they invited us to submit such a bid.

Our bid, one of three, was roughly $40,000 more than the next highest. They chose us nonetheless, and we built their house. We also built the two small houses for Madeline and Cathy by making up the shortfall with our extra earnings from the Squire project. Dreams came true, and mortgage payments were under $200. The Squires’ philosophical alignment with our purpose led them to become strong supporters of affordable-housing efforts on the Vineyard. Years later, when the Island Affordable Housing Fund was established to raise money for affordable housing, David became an important board member.

That was the first and only time that South Mountain inflated the cost of a project to support affordable housing efforts, but the experience inspired an idea that shaped the future of our company. If we could become a reasonably profitable enterprise, we could devote a portion of our earnings to affordable housing work for our community, and we could engage our wealthy clients in the issue.

At that point, the work of building second homes became meaningful. From then on, I often told new clients that they could count on me to ask them, in the future, to help with the Vineyard’s affordable housing problem (which they exacerbate, of course). I have done that now for 40 years, and the response has been heartwarming millions of dollars donated for attainable year-round housing.

Building second homes also allowed us to experiment and take risks. One of these occurred in 1987 when, in response to a request from two long-time employees for a greater stake, I sold South Mountain to my employees (and myself). We became a worker-owned cooperative and began to introduce new values to our business activities. For example, we committed to the creation of lifelong living-wage jobs and family-first policies, such as flexible work arrangements and stellar benefits. We began to codify our commitment to our community by donating to essential nonprofits and engaging in pro-bono work. We became a triple bottom line company long before we’d ever heard the term, measuring our success not just by our profits but also by effects on people and the planet.

Our journey since then has been influenced by many others, but particularly by Patagonia, the outdoor clothing and gear company that has become the gold standard for corporate social and environmental responsibility. Just like our second homes, many of Patagonia’s products are nonessential. Not everyone needs a pair of $300 ski pants or a lifetime wetsuit. So the company balances that reality with its social and environmental contributions, its political advocacy, and its important innovations, such as pioneering the use of organic and recycled cotton, and buying back old garments to refurbish and resell for far less than new ones.

Inspiration from Patagonia and others, combined with our own cantankerous sense of justice, has helped South Mountain become at once a profitable business, an active agent of community change, and a supporter of the local economy that supports us.

Today our second-home work is unusual in several ways. First, we restrict the size of the houses we are willing to build. Only on rare occasions, on very large parcels, have we designed and built houses over 3500 sq. ft.

We also use our second-home work for de-facto research to advance the building industry, especially with regards to energy performance, comfort, health, and durability. By experimenting with the homes of our well-to-do clients, we’ve learned a lot about high-performance building. As a result, we set minimum performance standards for our buildings that are well above code. Now we mostly produce net-zero-possible buildings. We use reclaimed materials extensively and are beginning to reduce embodied carbon (a work in progress with net-zero carbon as the ultimate goal).

By elevating performance standards, we make models that others can emulate and that we can incorporate in our affordable housing work. For us, truly affordable housing differs from luxury housing in only three ways: it’s smaller, it’s less detailed, and it’s differently financed. The performance and quality are uncompromised.

Perhaps the biggest step we have taken with our second-home work is doing less of it. Over time, we diversified South Mountain’s work into five parts; here’s a rough breakdown over the past year in terms of dollars per category:
• Limited-use second homes: 10%
• Year-round, fully occupied homes: 20%
• Attainable workforce housing: 10%
• Institutional work for nonprofits: 35%
• Solar for homes and businesses not built by us: 25%

This is only one year, and it happens to be a year with an uncharacteristically small amount of second-home work, but it indicates a direction: less harm, more good. Causing no harm is impossible — we are part of the problem too — but we share our experiences and hope others will join our push to turn some of the negative impacts of building into positive benefits for communities and the environment.

An added benefit of our business practices is that the second-home clients we attract tend to share our values. We love working with them. They go from being clients to becoming partners in our efforts to make the Vineyard a better place. Many have become friends for life. The rewards of this work and these relationships have become deeply ingrained in our core purpose.

A Joyous Building

November 16, 2021 by John Abrams 5 Comments

When a pack of wide-eyed youngsters cut the ribbons for the Island’s new Early Education and Care Center (EECC) earlier this month, it was a crowning moment – for both Martha’s Vineyard Community Services (MVCS) and South Mountain. It concluded five years of intensive planning, design, permitting and construction. (Technically it was far longer – MVCS first contacted us about renovating or replacing their outgrown, outmoded, and problematic buildings in 1999. But it wasn’t until 2017 that the organization was ready to create a long-term vision for a new campus and raise the funds to make it happen).

The new building is a tremendous improvement, but ultimately, it’s the program that the building houses that’s more important than the building itself. In a recent Vineyard Gazette article, Louisa Hufstader writes that “Nearly half of the Island’s children aged five and younger have no place to go for care and education while their parents are working.” The new EECC is the Vineyard’s largest early child care provider, with space for 65 kids plus a home-based Head Start program that accommodates another 40.

The scruffiest of the ribbon-cutting bunch – with his long unruly blonde hair – was my three-year old grandson Rockland. Among those behind him was Heather Quinn.

In the summer of 2008, my daughter Sophie was working at the Art Cliff Diner. Heather worked there too. At the time my wife Chris was the director of the Chilmark Preschool. Sophie learned that Heather had early childhood training and was a licensed preschool teacher. She told her mom about her new friend and said she should offer her a job. Chris did, and Heather took it.

In 2010 Chris was diagnosed with brain cancer and had surgery to remove it. One day during recovery at Mass General, Chris had a conference call with her teachers at the Chilmark Pre-School. She told them it was unlikely she’d be back for a long time (which turned out to be never). She said, “Heather, I want you to be the director. Laurisa, Talia, and Kathie – I want you to support Heather in every way that you can, and I know you will.” Both things happened.

A few years later Heather was hired to be the director of Early Childhood Programs at MVCS. Due to under-staffing, Heather has been teaching this year (as director, she usually doesn’t). Remarkably, the class that she teaches is Rock’s. Full circle. The woman mentored by Chris (the grandmother Rock never knew, because she died six months before he was born) is now Rock’s teacher. One of those multi-generational serendipitous stories that the Vineyard is full of, right?

Just a few years before Sophie met Heather at the Art Cliff, a young architect named Ryan Bushey came to work at South Mountain. Over time he became a company owner and today he is our Director of Architecture.

Ryan was the architect for the new EECC. But he was really the conductor of a comprehensive orchestra that always played in tune, due in large part to his attentiveness, creativity, collaborative spirit, leadership, and dedication. He deftly wove together:

MVCS staff (whose input was invaluable)
their highly effective building committee (led by board member Stephanie Mashek)
a collection of consultants (including Boston early childhood specialists Studio G)
a team of engineers who designed the structure and mechanical systems
town and regional regulatory officials
SMCo interior designer Beth Kostman
SMCo production staff led by Director of Production Newell Isbell-Shinn and Project Lead Rocco Bellebuono
our construction partner The Valle Group (based in Falmouth)
and a host of trade partners who did a stellar job.

Photo by Lynn Christophers for the MV Times

The process was tremendously complex but there was little strife. Despite the pandemic, it was completed on time and on budget. When students and staff transitioned from the old center to this new one, they went from a building that couldn’t have been much worse to a one that – I say immodestly, but with conviction – couldn’t be much better. The contrast is stark.

The new building epitomizes high performance in terms of energy, comfort, health, safety, and durability. The envelope is super-insulated. The mechanical systems are designed to provide highly efficient fossil-fuel-free ventilation, heat, and cooling (as designed, the ventilation system exceeded pandemic standards and required no updating). All finishes and furnishings are non-toxic. And with the addition of solar during the next phase, the building will likely produce more energy than it consumes.

The project also minimizes the negative impact on the Island ecology.  Stormwater is managed carefully with permeable pavement and rain gardens. Wastewater is treated with a denitrification system. The native plantings will thrive without irrigation. 

This is a building full of light. Nobody fails to notice this when they enter. Large windows and generous skylights flood every nook and cranny with daylight.

It’s a tranquil place. The teachers say their job is easier now than it was in the past – the thoughtful design, soothing colors, beautiful equipment, environmental comfort – all of these promote ease and well-being for staff and students alike. Parents even say it lifts their mood at drop-off and pick-up.

Donors can be proud that it’s economical too. Approximately 90% of the work was done by islanders, which rarely occurs with Vineyard public and institutional buildings. According to a benchmarking study conducted by CHA Companies, the owner’s representative for the project, this building cost the same or less than lower quality, less efficient off-island buildings of similar scale and use. Americans have become accustomed to mediocre buildings fashioned by a lowest-bidder, race-to-the-bottom mentality. There is no good reason for this. This building will cost little to maintain and operate, and it should serve our community well for 100 years or more.

Aside from all that, the building has another quality that results from Ryan and Beth’s design approach. Sometimes I pick Rock up after school and take him to the nearby skate park where he loves to ride his scooter with his friends. When he leaves the classroom, he always bounds up the cushion sculpture in the center of the atrium and jumps off the top. Joyously.

It’s a joyous building.

Coming Back Around

June 4, 2021 by John Abrams 9 Comments

The only time I ever built a physical model of a house was for the Chilmark house my late wife, Chris, our son Pinto, and I designed in 1982. He was 12, and our daughter Sophie, who would be born on the night we moved in (in late 1984), had not yet been imagined. I wonder what became of that foam-core model.

We built that house, lived there until Sophie was 15, and sold it in 1999. In those days, South Mountain’s shop, offices, and my family home were all located on our property adjacent to the Allen Farm. The company was growing, and we needed more space. We couldn’t expand on that site. It was time to move on. We migrated to West Tisbury to develop our current campus and Island Cohousing.

In 2011 I took the South Mountain architects to see the Chilmark house. Some of the younger ones had never seen it. “It’s very dynamic – the levels, the light, the textures,” said Matt Coffey.

The reason for the field trip was that the house was going to be torn down by its owners to make room for a new one. Only 28 years old, it was bulldozed, taken to the landfill and replaced with a high-end contemporary and pool.

It was one of my best buildings. It was hard to see it go, but we had experienced our emotional parting when we sold it 12 years before. Still, it was sad.

After the house was completed in 1984, for a time South Mountain’s work veered off-course. My colleagues and I had been on a design path that combined several threads: a “vernacular modern” style characterized by passive solar, natural daylighting, and dedication to craft and fine materials. But the vernacular and the craft began to take over; modern and solar took a backseat. It was to be a lengthy detour, at least 10 years, before high performance (in terms of energy, daylight, comfort, health, and durability) re-gained prominence in our work.

(Our country was charting a parallel course. Reagan was in office. The solar panels Jimmy Carter had installed on the White House were ridiculed and scrapped. Frivolous and tasteless post-modern design was all the rage – goofy pediments and all).

In 2005, I was working with Ryan Bushey (then a young architect, now our Director of Architecture & Engineering and one of my co-owners), on a zero-energy home. The site and solar opportunities were similar to that of the Chilmark house. I took Ryan to see it. Several aspects of his 2005 design were modeled after my 1983 design, but Ryan took it to another level.

The Chilmark house (where my family lived for 16 years) and another one completed in 1981, several miles away (that has been extensively remodeled in a way that took the soul out of the building) are, I think, the best examples of early SMCo work – both designed and built about 40 years ago.

One’s gone. One is a shadow of its former self. Fortunately, there are other decent examples of our early work, but those two have a special place in my heart (absence really does make the heart grow fonder).

I suppose I could have kept and cared for the Chilmark house. But I didn’t. It was important to make a break. The results of the development of Island Cohousing signified that SMCo was all the way back-on-track. And the Cohousing neighborhood was good place to live. It had its downs and ups. Chris succumbed to cancer in our house there in 2017; shortly after Sophie got married on the pond.

One of the prominent features of our Chilmark house was that it was built into a hillside and stepped down the hill in three levels. The lowest step was only 17”, the height of a chair. This was the dining area. A special round table with a large lazy Susan and a laminated semi-circular wood bench on the upper level provided some of the seating (the rest was chairs on the lower level). Everyone loved that table and space. Kids loved the lazy Susan. Dogs loved it that if someone left food on the table it was right at their height, ripe for poaching.

Before the house was torn down, the owner gave that table – lazy Susan and all – to a young neighbor, who grew up playing with Sophie. A few years ago, he passed it on to her. Our Shop Lead, Jim, restored and re-finished it, and replaced the lazy Susan bearings. Now Sophie, her husband John and their three young kids gather round it. Their twins, Bodie and Turner, born just two months ago, will know that table from birth, just as she did. Her three-year-old, Rockland, will probably ride the lazy Susan and tax those bearings just as she did. Maybe we’ll replace them for the third generation.

We find our calling and our path. The journey is complex. Along the way we stray. We find the way again. Things are dismantled and things are saved. Some circle back around.

There’s poetry in that.

P.S. The sweet little horse barn we built for Sophie and her friends on the Chilmark property remains. All is not lost, ever.

The Two Best Vineyard Banks

March 2, 2021 by John Abrams 1 Comment

Disclaimer: These words do not reflect the formal position of CCMVHB; they are my own.

One Exists. One doesn’t …yet.

In the 1980s the Vineyard experienced an explosion of population growth and development. Access to beaches and properties once enjoyed by all became limited. Islanders, sensing their way of life slipping away, got organized. After a grassroots campaign and an act by the Massachusetts State legislature, The Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank was established in 1986. Funded by a 2% transfer fee paid by buyers of Vineyard real estate, the Land Bank has transformed the island in diverse ways by buying and managing property for conservation and public access. It has expanded and created countless trail systems and provided new ways for the public to get to our beaches. It has initiated farming and affordable housing collaborations. It has helped to preserve wildlife habitats, pond and aquifer water quality, fishing and shellfishing – the essential ecological services we depend on.

The Land Bank has provided significant solutions, but their job is not complete; according to the Martha’s Vineyard Commission, nearly 16,000 acres of developable land remain up for grabs on the island, and it took the Land Bank more than three decades to protect 3,500.

Meanwhile, the pandemic real estate boom has intensified our affordable housing crisis. Despite 25 years of progress, the situation is worse than ever:
• There is a $780,000 gap between what the average Island family can afford and the median home sale price ($1.15 million in 2020).
• Only 38% of our housing stock is available for year-round occupancy
• Over 600 year-round residents and their families are waiting for year-round rentals, including 210 children.
• Rents are 30% above the statewide median costs while wages are 27% below the statewide median income.
• Over 300 year-round residents are currently on waiting lists to purchase homes within their financial reach.
• More than 1,200 Vineyard residents pay more than half their income for housing costs.

Another way of life is slipping away fast. Only a major long-term funding source can preserve it. It’s time for The Martha’s Vineyard Housing Bank, the other most important Vineyard bank. This is not to take anything away from the importance of existing local commercial banks; only to say that the Land Bank and the Housing Bank are the vital cornerstones of a balanced and prosperous future.

Island Housing Trust’s “Eliakim’s Way” neighborhood is West Tisbury.

We’ve tried before. A 2005 Gazette editorial stated: “The housing bank initiative has cleared its first major regional hurdle now that all six towns have thrown their support behind the idea, which aims to create a bank of money for affordable housing using a transfer fee on most real estate transactions. The Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank is the model . . . “

With overwhelming support from the Vineyard, the Housing Bank failed in 2005 in the state legislature due to the strong lobbying of the Massachusetts Association of Realtors, who disliked the concept of transfer fees. At the time, the median home sale price was approximately $500,000.

That was then. This is now.

With median real estate prices over $1,000,000 and the need greater than ever; there have been multiple calls for a renewed effort to establish a Housing bank.

They are being answered.

The Coalition to Create The MV Housing Bank (CCMVHB) is a citizens’ campaign to establish a regional Housing Bank for Martha’s Vineyard.

The campaign is led by a 12-person Steering Committee co-chaired by Julie Fay and Arielle Faria. (Other members include Kimberly Angell, Makenzie Brookes, Caitlin Burbidge, Stan McMullen, Elaine Miller, Lucy Morrison, Juliet Mulinare, Doug Ruskin, Abbie Zell, and me.)

We are supported by one paid staffer (Laura Silber, our Coalition Coordinator) and a growing “Coalition Council” whose members include selectpersons, town affordable housing committee members, county commissioners, business leaders, realtors, young professionals, housing activists, and those in need of housing – from every town.

Meanwhile, there is a dramatically different political climate in the Commonwealth. At this moment the towns and cities of Nantucket, Provincetown, Boston, Somerville, Brookline, and Concord have all passed Home Rule Petitions to create Housing Banks. All are based on transfer fees. A coalition of these communities has formed which includes the Vineyard. The island coalition is working closely with our state representatives – Dylan Fernandes in the House and Julian Cyr in the Senate.

To meet the goals of the Housing Production Plans created by the six towns in 2018, we will need to create hundreds of units of community housing during the years to come.

It is time for action.

The plan to model the new Housing Bank after the existing MV Land Bank means there is no identifiable group of people (besides the pool of unidentified future buyers of Vineyard real estate) who will be adversely affected, and because this would be an entirely new funding source, it would not tap into or alter existing funding streams like the short-term rental tax or Community Preservation Act funds.

Some ask why not try to use some of the existing Land Bank funds? Not only is it a flawed strategy to pit one good thing against another – conservation vs housing – but there just isn’t enough money; the Land Bank needs its funds. More than 60% of its budget goes to land management and to service existing debt; it needs the rest to continue its work.

Another common question is: will this lead to extensive new development? We will certainly need some. But the Vineyard has 18,000 existing buildings. Some of these can be purchased and re-purposed as affordable housing. Accessory dwellings (ADUs) can be built on developed properties. I hope the Housing Bank will prioritize expenditures on already-developed land and mechanisms like down-payment assistance for first-time homebuyers.

Winners of the “Jenney Way” housing lottery, crossing the threshold of their new home.

During the first half of 2021, CCMVHB is forming committees in each town, bringing the concept to town boards, and designing the new housing bank. During the year that follows, we expect to create warrant articles in all six towns and bring them to town meetings; if successful in all six towns, we will advance to the state legislature.

Between now and then, there are plenty of questions to answer: how much will the transfer fee be, who will be exempted from paying, who will be served, and for what uses will funding be available? In terms of governance, I hope the Housing Bank will adhere closely to the Land Bank structure – run by an elected commissioner from each town, a representative from the Commonwealth, and professional staff. Each town would have a Housing Bank Town Advisory Board which would have to approve development in its town. This combines regional vision and oversight with ultimate local control and is a tried-and-true method that has worked for the Land Bank for 35 years. There’s no need to re-invent this wheel.

Community consists of a place and those who have a relationship with it. Land conservation is important. People conservation is equally vital.

School teachers and social workers, farmers and fisherman, nurses and nannies, truck drivers and technicians, artists and arborists, plumbers and plasterers, carpenters and curmudgeons, troublemakers and troubleshooters, those of different ages, abilities, incomes, colors, religious beliefs, and gender identities – we need all of these people to maintain a living, breathing community.

Taking bold measures about affordable housing will ensure that the Vineyard community we know and love won’t recede like the eroding shoreline.

Support the CCMVHB effort by
– Visiting ccmvhb.org to learn more, and informing your peers.
– Emailing info@ccmvhb.org to join the Coalition.
– Making a donation to The MV Community Foundation earmarked for CCMVHB to cover campaign expenses
– Following our progress on Instagram and Facebook @ccmvhb.

An island united can get this done once and for all. Our two essential Banks, working side-by-side, can assure the future we all wish for rather than the one that circumstances will otherwise dictate.

The PV Diaries

September 14, 2020 by John Abrams 2 Comments

As our primary sales contact these past 45 years, I have known every one of South Mountain’s clients. And I have usually known them well.

Until 2007, that is, when we began to install solar systems for people other than our design/build clients. At that time, Energy Technology Director Rob Meyers became the primary solar contact, shepherding hundreds toward clean, renewable, power. In those 13 years, we have installed roughly 500 systems for homes, businesses, and landfills across the island. Many of their owners I have never met.

Five years ago, I asked John Guadagno, our Energy Technology Project Manager, to alert me – from time to time – when he turns on new systems, so I could gain a sense of who we are working for and how their projects went. And so he began to email brief vignettes about client and job. Occasionally – very occasionally, unfortunately – I find the time to follow up on them personally. More often I run into people at Cronig’s or elsewhere who approach me and say, “You installed a solar system on my house!”

“Oh, amazing,” I respond, “thanks for saying. How’d it go?”

Invariably they gush.

Recently I read a post from JG and thought, “This is a remarkable record of the human side of doing business. I think I’ll look back, pull some up, and re-read.”

They seemed worth sharing; here are just a few of many:

8/17/15
Today I turned on the 14.7 kW roof mounted solar array at MV Shipyard. For me personally, this was the most enjoyable system to turn on. I have been talking about solar with Phil Hale (the former owner) since the 90’s. Phil has been wanting to do this for nearly 40 years. It is almost fitting that his son, James Hale (now President of MV Shipyard), led the charge. They are very happy. As you know, I really like happy clients. As you also know, these guys are both great friends.
[NOTE: Before coming to South Mountain, JG worked at the MV Shipyard for nearly a decade.]

5/1/17
Polly Hill PV2 – they are addicted! Another 24.85 kW added to the existing 10.46 kW we installed in 2013. They built a new Education center. We installed 12.4 kW on this new building and 12.4 kW on the existing “Cow Barn” building next door. Great clients. When I arrived to provide the walk through there was a crowd of maybe 15 Polly Hill employees. Lots of interest and great questions.

5/1/17
Lin Gallant – 9.66 kW roof mounted at their house in Vineyard Haven. Lin is a structural Engineer, has worked on many solar projects, and has built a new house in VH. He came to us for a HERS rating and consultation with Marc. Lin has turned out to be a great client. Very happy with his installation. We hired him to look at Cottle’s for PV. He will relocate to the Island with his wife and two young children soon. I hope we can work with him in the future.
[NOTE: This was the beginning of an important relationship. After Lin and family moved to the Vineyard, he quit his off-island job and came to work full time at SMCo, where he has brought the structural engineering discipline in-house, helping to integrate our design/build process more than ever.]

6/6/18
Today I turned on a 3.9 kW roof mounted array for Geneva and Calvin Corwin in Vineyard Haven. Geneva found a path for Cape Light Compact to pay for her entire solar array! She is so lovely, with two little ones running around their newly expanded home.
[NOTE: Cape Light Compact partnered with the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center in 2018 to offer grants covering the cost of solar on affordable housing. That grant program is no longer available.]

6/13/18
Yesterday I turned on a 5.76 kW roof mounted array for Primo at his house in Vineyard Haven. Fellow co-workers are some of my favorite systems to do. We are so psyched for Primo and his sweet new home.
[NOTE: Primo Lombardi is an SMCo employee and co-owner. We have installed 24 systems on the homes of employees and former employees.]

7/26/18
Today, I met Jim Feiner and Deb Dunn at their home in Chilmark. I turned on their array last week and met them today for a tutorial walk through of their new 7.92 kW ground mounted solar array. They were very excited. Deb said she has been thinking about this for over 15 years.

10/31/18
Yesterday, I met Sean Conley and Teri Mello at their Aikido Dojo (next to their house) in West Tisbury. They ‘flipped the switch’ while I provided a tutorial walk through of their new 7.85 kW roof mounted solar array. Sean has been a life-long Aikido student and now teaches youngsters. He rallied the community to help design and build this DoJo in the early 80’s. You may recognize one of the Harcourt brothers hanging (to right) in the trusses. Sean and Teri are thrilled.

11/30/19
On Wednesday I met Bill Connolly at his home in Edgartown. I ‘flipped the switch’ and provided a tutorial walk through of his new 17.28 kW roof mounted solar array. I met him late in the afternoon before the holiday and we struggled to get his monitor going. It took me about 30 minutes to discover his iPad was so old it did not support the Solar Edge App. His son was visiting for the Turkey holiday and quietly asked if Dad needs a new iPad. Bill emailed me on 11/29 to say he got a new one and the monitoring is fantastic!

6/23/20
Yesterday, I met Ann Lees at her home in Chilmark. I ‘flipped the switch’ and we sat outside while I provided a tutorial walk through of her new 5.76 kW roof mounted solar array. Ann was so lovely to work with (yes I know, broken record). We spoke several times over the phone through the process and yesterday we finally met in person. She is a long time seasonal resident and her husband remembers Hoppy (I think that was what we called your dad?). Ann and her late husband were both physicians. Long ago her husband worked with your dad in CA. She was thrilled to work with South Mountain and noted the whole team from Rob on down did not disappoint!
[NOTE: My Dad, who died in 2016 at the age of 95, was always called Hoppy by friends and family.]

7/17/20
On 6/24/20 I met Alex Morrison at his and Maggie’s new home in Edgartown. Alex ‘flipped the switch’ while I provided a tutorial walk through of their new 14.4 kW roof mounted solar array. Alex and Maggie are three-peat solar clients. We were all thrilled to work with them again and the install – which happened during the early stages of COVID – went smoothly.

7/17/20
Yesterday, I met Scott Stephens and Penny Uhlendorf at their home in Vineyard Haven and provided a tutorial walk through of their new 5.04 kW roof mounted solar array. They are great folks and thrilled with their experience and new solar array.
[NOTE: Scott and Penny own a house – one of my favorites – that we designed and built for Sally Coker (now deceased) maybe 30 years ago.]

That’s a sampling of JG’s reports. Some people consider solar panels and systems to be a commodity. These brief stories say something different – they show the personal side of these transactions, for our clients and for us. They speak of connections between people in our company and those we serve, connections that often last for decades.

We are grateful to our incredible energy technology team – Rob, Faren, JG, Phil, and John M – and to the others who support them – from our engineering team to our admin team, to our trade partners. It takes a village. From the outside, it would be hard to imagine how complex each of these projects are – from sales cycle to site assessments, from policy work to financing, from permitting to installation, from commissioning to long-term monitoring and maintenance.

As Rob and the team constantly improve this process, it becomes more efficient, effective, and client-centric. Systematization does not make it any less human, only more, and all work together to stay one step ahead of the ever-shifting solar policy landscape.

We are grateful, as well, to our clientele, the ones I’ve met and the ones I haven’t. They make this impact-driven work rewarding and meaningful.

Silver Linings

May 26, 2020 by John Abrams 5 Comments

Photo by Timothy Dewitt for the Vineyard Gazette.

Several years ago, I read an article in The New Yorker called “Estonia: The Digital Republic”. It named the small Eastern European country “most digitized government in the world”. In Estonia, government services – like legislation, voting, education, justice, health care, banking, taxes, policing, driver’s licenses and registrations – transact online in a fast, easy, secure, reliable, and effective system available to everyone. I remember thinking at the time, “This wired-up nation is providing a glimpse of what a more rational and inclusive future could look like.”

I was reminded of this last week when Joe Tierney, who runs our local building department, notified us that building permits are now available online. No more driving to town hall hoping to find Joe or his assistant Jeff. No more paper to copy, collate and deliver. One silver lining of our pandemic-hammered newly shuttered socially-distanced society. No way that’s going back to normal when this is all over. Yes, some personal contact will be lost. But more will be gained. Progress never comes without consequences.

We are no longer at the beginning of this pandemic. We are nowhere near the end. With many lives lost, others threatened, and all of ours fundamentally different than they were a few months ago, it might seem too early to be looking for the silver linings.

But it’s never too soon for that.

In many ways, our lives today are more stressful than ever: Widespread illness and death. Massive job losses and economic disruption. Deficient federal leadership (the silver lining here is that Trump is clearly taking himself down and all the way out.) Those who are already poverty-stricken endure even more hardship. The curtailment of freedoms we treasure. The confinement. The constant veil of uncertainty. Walking around in masks like it’s Halloween (you can’t even recognize friends and neighbors in the grocery store aisles).

But in other ways, you could say our new life has picnic-like qualities (although it does seem a bit like a dog came by and swiped all the sandwiches when nobody was looking).

In mid-April, I scribbled a note to myself: “I love the Vineyard roads during these shelter-in-place times. Mostly empty. Like the winter of 1975 – nearly half a century ago – when we would drive from home in Chilmark to Vineyard Haven. Often, we wouldn’t pass a single car during the 20 minute trip. It’s kind of like that now. Instead of staring at the car in front of me, I can watch the road ahead and look left and right as I drive. I appreciate the signs of gratitude for the grocery and hospital workers. The cherry tree in front of Edu-Comp is in full bloom, at one of the busiest intersections on the island, now quiet. As I head up-island, I enjoy the living tree canopies that reach out over the road – for light – and join with their counterparts on the other side.”

Silver linings.

Here at South Mountain, as in so many other companies and households, we spend our time gathering and collaborating on Zoom. We’re getting used to it. And better at it. So much so that the idea of meeting in a room sitting around a table is starting to seem old fashioned, like making a call standing in a phone booth after putting a dime in the slot. You’re right. . . it’s not that good of a replacement, but virtual meeting comfort and competence will surely serve us well, far beyond this pandemic. And when the time comes that it makes sense for certain meetings to be face-to-face, it will be all the sweeter.

Silver linings.

Here are a few witnessed on MV, from the mundane but poetic, to the lifesaving and essential:

• Kim’s puzzle exchange at the end of our road. She and Livey do puzzles. They ran out. She said, “Let’s make a puzzle exchange.” I sketched a crude drawing and got some old lumber from the SMCo yard. Our friend Rob built a sweet little shed. Kim and Livey made signage and instructions for use. When Kim announced it on the “Islanders Talk” Facebook group, 200 people responded with likes and comments. Countless puzzles came and went.

• Civil engineer Chris Alley waking up the morning after his office closed with nothing to do and deciding to walk Barnes Road, every day, bit by bit, picking up trash, including 400 discarded nips bottles in one stretch.

• Parents faced with their childrens’ at-home education discovering new ways to relate to their kids and new respect for the teachers they sometimes criticized. By the way, March of this year was the first month without a U.S. school shooting since March 2002. Eighteen years.

• Breaking free from the traditional political handcuffs caused by six different towns co- existing on one small island. One town wants this, another wants that. Regionalization used to be rejected by parochialism. But now, like never before, the towns are collaborating and acting in concert. Selectpersons, health agents, hospital – all on the same page. One island, one town at last.

• An outpouring of support for essential community institutions – non-profits that serve those most in need and iconic local businesses in trouble.

Silver linings galore.

More than anything, maybe, this time is a rest for the planet – a vivid testimony to the importance of consigning the sacred growth-at-all-cost economy to the dustbin of history. Overcoming the pandemic foreshadows the real work ahead: the long and hard but fully negotiable road to an absolute reckoning with climate change. According to the New York Times, the United States is on track to produce more electricity from renewable power than from coal for the first year on record, a milestone that seemed all but unthinkable a decade ago. Accelerating the transition to renewable energy is the sure path to restoration of the economy (that has been ransacked by the pandemic) and healing the planet (that has been ravaged by our insatiable appetites). Maybe, just maybe, we will look back on this as a hinge point that straightened our crooked path.

We may be developing a new sense that we are truly all in this together – that what I do, affects you, and what you do, affects me. And that each choice made affects the home we share. Columnist David Brooks calls this “a hidden solidarity, which I, at least, did not know was there.”

To assert that there is good news could seem insensitive to our current collective troubles. But there’s a door opening. And if it’s possible to walk through that door and use the good news to inspire transformation, it would be a terrible mistake to overlook it.

Our resilience is remarkable, as is our transcendent ability to create joy in the face of tragedy. The strength of our collective will to work together is tangible and unshakeable. Maybe it leads to renewal.

Yes, every cloud truly does have a silver lining, even this tragic and frightening pandemic cloud. Especially this one.

Larger Than Life

August 14, 2019 by John Abrams 3 Comments

When Paul Simmons was 22, he built a house in Acushnet, just down the road from his hometown of New Bedford, where his father had a concrete form business. He built it from the ground up – the foundation and everything else too. He and his first wife raised two sons there.

For the last 30 years (since he was 32), Paul has battled multiple sclerosis. He was diagnosed a few days after the morning he woke up, got out of bed, and crumpled to the floor. He had no feeling from the waist down. When the doctors finally figured out what was wrong, one of them, a neurologist, told Paul he would never walk again.

“Give me that goddam wheelchair,” Paul replied. He pulled himself into it, wheeled to the door, and left the room, only looking back to say to the doctor, “I don’t ever want to see your face again.”

Three weeks later, Paul shoved the wheelchair against the wall and asked his wife for a walker. He got up. He learned to walk. A few months later, he went skiing! Paul has always loved to ski. It was the favored family activity when his kids were growing up, but in recent years, his degenerative MS has made each run more difficult.

Last year, he tackled Wildcat Mountain with his grandkids. From the summit, he looked across the valley to Tuckerman’s Ravine at Mt. Washington, remembering the times he had hiked and skied the headwall, the good lines, the beautiful days. The day before, skiing with the kids, Paul had fallen and couldn’t get up. He did, somehow. Now, a day later, he could feel that this run was going to be trouble. Maybe his last one.

He told the kids to go on ahead; he would catch up. It took him an hour and a half to struggle down the mountain, in part because it was such a monumental effort and in part because he kept stopping, looking across the valley, savoring his last run.

Paul takes after his Dad. His company, L.P. Simmons (it used to stand for “Lonely and Poor” after his second divorce, now it’s “Level and Plumb” deep into his third marriage), has built all our concrete foundations for the past few decades. The rough-and-tumble, boisterous nature of Paul and his cohort overlays consummate professionalism, tremendous skill, and a remarkable breadth of experience.

Paul is very good at what he does.

He has skied hundreds of days and built hundreds of foundations with no feeling in his knees. These days, he can’t manage the hard physical work; his son, Tim, manages the on-site aspect of his business. Tim says his Dad is his number one priority (don’t tell his partner Aja). He says Paul’s a genius. “He looks at a set of plans and immediately sees everything. And he can do anything. But he should have been a critic – that’s his real calling. Food, movies, me – he’ll tell you what he thinks about all of ‘em.” Tim has been through some rough times, too, and beat the odds. He feels that his father’s love was a big part of what carried him through the rapids.

Paul’s physical limitations don’t stop him. Remember that house he built 40 years ago? Since then, he has built half a dozen more in his spare time. Today he lives at the end of a dirt road in Vineyard Haven with his wife Ann. Recently, he took me for a tour. The house is chockablok full of hand-crafted treasures – ingenious woodwork (much of it made with reclaimed lumber from our yard, from jobsites, and driftwood). There are curvy polished concrete counters and fine tile work. There’s even a recent addition to the house with a beautiful iron and wood stair railing. He still does everything himself (mostly).

Paul with wife Ann in their Vineyard Haven home.

He has a tiny shop in the basement with rudimentary tools. He carefully figures out everything he needs, goes downstairs, cuts the pieces, and hauls them up. Once they’ve arrived upstairs, they don’t go back down for corrections. It’s too hard to negotiate the stairs. He measures twice and cuts once.

Whenever Paul comes to our office (these days assisted by a cane) to drop off a quote or pick up a check, he lights the place up. He’s as friendly as he is loud, and he brings a bit of joy into the day, no matter how he’s feeling. As our Director of Finance, Siobhán, describes it, “Everyone starts smiling. He’s larger than life.”

We’re lucky to work with him, to benefit from his vast experience, to enjoy his friendship, and to endure his good-natured insults and admonishments. The positive spirit and defiant optimism that pulled him up out of that wheelchair 30 years ago continue to define him. He’s a lesson to us all.

Eddie Cottle Sr.

February 7, 2019 by John Abrams 4 Comments

Ed and his wife Betty in their Lambert’s Cove home. Photo by Mark Alan Lovewell, courtesy of the Vineyard Gazette.

Eddie Cottle Sr., the founder and longtime proprietor of E.C. Cottle Lumberyard., died on November 9th at the age of 87. Quiet, fair, modest, and generous, he had a big heart and a fine sense of humor. He lived on Lambert’s Cove Road in West Tisbury, where the yard is located, for almost his entire life.

For the last 43 years, E.C. Cottle has been South Mountain’s primary lumberyard. It was there long before we were here, opening in the early fifties when Ed was in his early twenties.

As it says in Ed’s obituary, “He worked tirelessly to make the lumberyard a very successful and well respected business. He appreciated his customers and his employees. He never forgot his humble beginnings and would often, very quietly, help a contractor or anyone else if he saw that they were struggling.”

Many years ago we needed a stationary shaper for our shop. There was one in the E.C. Cottle shop that was never used; it had a thick coating of dust and was piled high with Playboy and Penthouse. I asked Ed if he wanted to sell it.

“Sure,” he said. “We never use it.”

“How much do you want for it?” I asked.

“Oh I don’t know,” he replied, “Just put the magazines on the floor, take the shaper, and we’ll figure it out later.”

We moved the shaper to our shop. And for years after that, whenever I saw him, I’d say, “Hey Ed, we need to settle up for that shaper, remember?”

He’d mutter something and never answer the question. One time he said, “Oh forget it, we’re square.”

It became a refrain. Whenever I saw him, I’d say “when are we gonna settle up on that shaper?”

He’d chuckle and say, “We’re square.”

South Mountain still uses the shaper today.

My friend Richard Greene told me, at Ed’s internment, that the last time he’d had a laugh with Ed was at the opening of our new shop 20 years ago. The two were looking at all the beautifully crafted woodwork made from reclaimed lumber, full of nail holes and defects. Ed leaned over to Richard, grinning, and said, “Where I come from we throw that stuff away.”

Where Ed came from business was done on a handshake, loyalty was a virtue, and there was nothing but the truth. That’s good business, in my view. He was a good man.

Jabberwocky: There’s Nothing Else Like It

September 10, 2018 by John Abrams 3 Comments

Camp Jabberwocky is a magical place where dreams come true and nothing is impossible. It’s been that way for 65 years.

The first page of Clark Hanjian’s Jabberwocky: A Brief History of The Martha’s Vineyard Cerebral Palsy Camp begins with: “On a small island in the North Atlantic, off the southern shore of Massachusetts, there is a place where hope flourishes. The place is Camp Jabberwocky – a small summer camp for the disabled. . .”

On September 5th the last campers of the summer left Camp Jabberwocky. Two days later, we began a major overhaul of the main building, known as the Mess Hall, and other parts of the facility. The 14-acre campus, with 17 buildings, which usually falls silent at the end of the summer, is chock full of activity and change. In mid-May, just before the campers return, this transformation will be complete and Jabberwocky will be, we hope, just a bit more magical than ever before.

Last week, as Jabberwocky executive director Liza Gallagher sat with SMCo architects Matt Coffey and Beth Kostman reviewing the proposed furnishings and color schemes for the new space, she told us that the day before, as a session ended and campers departed, there were many tears and some wailing. Some of these campers have been here every season for 30 years.

This is where, as Clark says:
Disabled folks are at the center of a community rather than at the periphery.

The camp started [in the early 50’s] as a small experiment: a handful of children with cerebral palsy, a tiny summer cottage, a director, and a young assistant. From there, the camp has grown to a. . .volunteer staff of well over forty people [and several paid]. It now serves about one hundred disabled children and adults every summer.

Jabberwocky is a community. It has families and extended families, and grandparents, and children. It has births and deaths and marriages. It has oral history, traditions, myths, and legends. It has people with a full range of abilities, skills, and interests. And these people work, play, eat, and create together. They argue and dance together. They write and cry together. And like people in other communities, they are here year after year. A few come and go each season, but the majority are here living together every summer.

For most of the year, disabled people are in the minority. They are stared at, singled out for special treatment, and generally viewed as outside the mainstream of normal life. For a couple of months each year, the camp provides a break from this routine. At Jabberwocky, people with disabilities form the majority of the community. Their experience becomes the dominant experience. Their needs become the priority needs. Their concerns become common concerns. In these wondrous times the whole community becomes as family.

It is a record of experiments and risks. A portrait of cooperation. Jabberwocky is a tale of bountiful harvest from a few scattered seeds. It is an epic of generosity and thanksgiving. Stories like this are crucial to the existence of humanity. They remind us of what great things are possible in our limited days. And so, we need to keep telling them.

This summer we had the great good fortune to be a part of a new Jabberwocky program. The old red bus rolled into our yard on four occasions with a group of campers who came to do woodworking in our shop. “The campers were positive, upbeat, and hilarious,“ says Jim Vercruysse, our shop project lead. “My favorite time was at the end of each class when we would take a group photo holding up our finished projects and call out ‘JABBERWOCKY!’ It felt great to be part of such an enthusiastic and cheerful bunch.”

At the end of the summer of 1966 a counselor named Linda Yenkin wrote in the Vineyard Gazette:
We are all tired now, but when the children are gone and the camp is quiet, when there is no more Skipper wandering off and calling everyone he meets a pigeon, and when there is no more Kevin yelling in the Mad Hatter’s ear in the very early morning, “Move over, my bed’s broke,” when we no longer hear any more off-key singing in the condemned looking red bus, when all this is gone, then we will miss it all very much, and only then will we realize that we have to wait an entire year for the magic to begin again. But the magic never wears off.

There is, I’m certain, nothing in the world quite like Camp Jabberwocky. And now it will change. Some of the campers said good-bye to the old mess hall and “thanked it for the memories,” said Liza.

The project is part of a fundamental shift in our company’s work or, rather, an expansion of the breadth of our endeavors. Our high-end residential projects, affordable housing work, performance engineering, and solar design/installations continue, but another arena has become central: institutional work for non-profit organizations. At the same time as we have been completing the Jabberwocky plans, we have begun planning for a new campus for Martha’s Vineyard Community Services (our umbrella social service agency which serves 6,000 Islanders each year), and an expansion of the Island Grown Initiative’s Farm Hub.

Our previous experience with institutional work has been limited to master planning efforts, so this is new for us. Each of these projects requires significant learning. But that’s nothing new – we always seem to be doing something different that we must learn how to do before we do it. Exciting stuff. Keeps the blood pumping and the synapses firing. As long as the inevitable mistakes are minor, all’s well.

I can’t adequately describe the thrill of working with this organization and watching this project slowly find its form and round into shape. There are times in life when you know that you are doing what ought to be done, that the work that you are doing is bringing fundamental positive change to a place or an organization or a community. Those are particularly rewarding times.

In service to that notion, some of our recent strategic planning work has focused on committing ourselves to finding ways to engage in as much of this impact-driven work as possible. Now those opportunities are rolling in. Apparently, saying dreams out loud is the first step toward realization. Simple as that.

We’re off on an inspiring, soul-stirring ride at Jabberwocky!

Bill Graham and His Mohu Legacy

March 23, 2018 by John Abrams 6 Comments

I saw The Post recently. Good Spielberg. Compelling history. As always, Meryl Streep was superb as she captured all the nuances of Katharine Graham’s emergence as a woman to be reckoned with. I was struck by the moment when she said, “My husband used to say the news is the first rough draft of history.”

But The Post wasn’t just history for me. It reminded me of my personal history – and South Mountain’s – with her land, her house, and her son Bill.

Katharine Graham died in 2001. Her son Bill inherited the 218 acre property – called Mohu – that included her fabled house. Built in the 1920’s, the sprawling house occupied a prominent place on the land overlooking James Pond and beyond to the Elizabeth Islands. It was highly visible from nearby Lambert’s Cove Beach. For several years Bill wondered what to do with this evocative (but empty) 10,000 square foot summer house.

One day, sitting on the beautiful bluff in front of the house, he got the answer: undevelop the site and put the house to good purpose. The site, he realized (which had always been his favorite place on the planet) could become even more beautiful without the house. But how could the house best be used?

He called and asked me to come look at it. He explained his idea and asked if we could cut the house into pieces, move them, and create affordable housing from the parts. I told him it wasn’t feasible. The road was narrow and closely bounded by stone walls; the house would have ended up in small pieces. But the house was full of good simple materials – wood and doors and tile – that could be salvaged and effectively re-used. There was no sheetrock, no plaster, nothing to throw away. I suggested that he hire us to dismantle the house piece by piece and save everything. Once apart, he could donate the materials to The Island Affordable Housing Fund, to use them in the construction of new affordable housing and/or sell them to help fund affordable housing.

Bill liked this plan, and hired South Mountain Company to do the job. We set about meticulously unbuilding the house. It was a tough job that required three months of demanding labor. It was highly uneconomic, but tremendously gratifying, for Bill and for us.

The site was restored to a verdant meadow that blended with its surroundings. Two stone fireplaces and their chimneys were left standing, silhouetted against the sky, a reminder of the history that was embodied in the house. An immense stash of materials was bundled, stacked, inventoried, stored in a barn and gradually put to good use.

Because the house was located near the water, we needed approval from the West Tisbury Conservation Commission. When they came to do the site visit, they asked, “What will it be replaced with?”

I answered, “Nothing. Bill is undeveloping the site and restoring it to the way it was before the house was built, nearly a century ago.”

Most in the Vineyard community applauded the project.

A few people didn’t.

One of these was the contrarian left-wing journalist Alex Cockburn. I had followed Cockburn’s work in The Nation for decades. I appreciated his no-holds-barred writing style, but sometimes he seemed to go a bit beyond the pale for shock value. Somehow he heard about Mohu and thought it was appalling that this house had been “demolished”. He led off an article about it with this polemic: “Here’s a question for you. Which scion of which well-known newspaper dynasty assembled a squadron of bulldozers in May of 2005, mounted the lead bulldozer and led this rumbling squadron into a ferocious assault on the house his mother left him on her death in 2001? When it was over, a house which had seen visits from President William Jefferson Clinton and First Lady Nancy Reagan lay in splinters and rubble.”

Alex had no clue what the real story was, but over the next few months the two of us exchanged e-mails. Having his prickly pen pointed directly at me sometimes smarted. But I can say this: whether he agreed with my explanations or not (mostly he didn’t), at the end of that exchange, he at least knew the facts.

This is a story of re-purposing: the restoration of a beautiful place and the re-use of fine materials. This is a story of conservation: appropriate land use and putting waste to good purpose rather than into a landfill.

Some years after the Mohu de-construction, we renovated a beach house on Bill’s property. Working with Bill was never easy but it was usually rewarding. He was brilliant, creative, generous, and compassionate. He had great taste and he loved conversation. I always had a soft spot for him.

Recently Bill Graham committed suicide (you can read his obituary here), like his father before him. One of the sad parts of this tragic ending was the conclusion of Bill’s deep love affair with that large and wonderful property. When he first moved there, it was mostly overgrown new growth woodlands filled with poison ivy, bull briars, rocks, and brush. Restoring it became his lifelong project. He reverently brought it back to life. He cleared it bit by bit, restored stone walls, made a beautiful network of paths, and engaged the Dunkls (that’s a whole other story!) to make organic bridges, walkways, and steps around and over the beautiful brook that ran through.

I’m sorry that he’s no longer a part of this place, and that remarkable land.

But he is. He made his mark.

The Ultimate Customer Service

December 27, 2017 by John Abrams 5 Comments

There’s a saying that “Customer service is an attitude, not a department.” The story that follows might be a perfect illustration of those wise words.

In 2009, as part of a renovation project, we re-built 2000 square feet of wood deck surrounding three sides of a house near the water. To frame the deck we used a highly anticipated, well-regarded (by respected sources) new lumber product called TimberSIL. Touted as pressure treated lumber without the chemicals, it was infused with a baked-in, supposedly rot-resistant glass barrier. The material was guaranteed to last for 40 years, and contained no residual chemicals so that when the wood reached the end of its useful life, it could be chipped up and used as mulch. The TimberSIL slogan was “Locked in for life”. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a pathetically short life.

Fortunately the material was so problematic to work with that we never used it again. Unfortunately, that one time we did use it was for a very large job. This year it failed, miserably. From a serviceable deck to a major hazard in no time flat. We discovered that there have been other major failures, most notably in the case of Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation, which used it on houses they built in the post-Katrina 9th ward re-building, only to experience severe failures. Not surprisingly, the company is out of business and nowhere to be found.

We learned that that our liability insurance doesn’t cover this loss and that our client’s Homeowners’ coverage has a limitation for rot coverage that wouldn’t come anywhere near the cost of the new deck.

We felt that our clients deserved a new deck, but we also felt that they should participate in the replacement cost as they got eight years of service life and will now get a new deck. They agreed, but a very large chunk of the financial responsibility was on us.

I took Sandy Ray, the owner of Martha’s Vineyard Insurance (he sold it to a larger company five years ago but is still involved) out to see it. He said, “your liability insurance carrier would only cover if there was an incident and something or somebody were damaged.”

I said, “Look at this, Sandy, it’s an accident waiting to happen. Doesn’t the insurer want to avoid an accident?”

He said, “you know, John, it makes sense, but insurance companies are not known for their foresight. And there just isn’t any coverage.”

“I get it, Sandy,” I said, “but here’s the thing. Over the past four decades we have paid your company literally millions of dollars for insurance and never made a claim. Now we have a problem and we want help. There must be something you can do. I hope you’ll get creative and come up with something. I know you can do it!”

Three days later, he called and said he wanted to come talk to me. He said they can’t refund premiums or commissions, but, he said, “My son Matthew and I are going to do the dismantling of the deck for you.”

“You’re going to what?” I said.

“It’s something we can do to help,” replied Sandy.

It’s no exaggeration to say that he got about as creative as you can get – and then some! When he said he and Matt wanted to do the de-construction of the deck as a gesture of participation, I was startled. It was way more than a gesture! It was 100 hours of grueling work. Sandy, at the age of 73, worked throughout, long days. They did a beautiful job, they did it promptly, and they did it with great humor and plenty of pride.

I said to Sandy, “I’ve heard of good customer service, but this takes the cake!” We are grateful, impressed, and appreciative.

The new deck is complete. Ultimately, the cost has been equitably shared by all. Everyone’s feeling pretty good. Bad situation, sweet resolution.

I have no idea how much of this inferior product TimberSIL sold. There doesn’t appear to be much information available. I hope it wasn’t much.

It is not uncommon for us to be faced with evaluating new products that appear to be improvements over old products. We generally do so warily and carefully, with the understanding that when we choose to experiment there’s risk involved and that we may have to make good on failures that occur. Fortunately it doesn’t happen often. It’s heartbreaking when it does. In this case it was a good example of plain old bad judgment. But when you receive “the ultimate customer service “ it sure does take the sting out of it!

It’s looking a bit better now, isn’t it?