Walk down Basin Road this week and the lights are finally on in a building that has sat dark for years. The Menemsha Store is opening its doors just after Labor Day, which this year landed on September 7, meaning the timing puts the opening right now, this week. If you have lived in Chilmark long enough to remember buying milk and the newspaper at the old Menemsha Market, the return matters. But the building you are picturing is not the one that is reopening, and understanding why says something real about how this fishing village actually gets fixed.
What Seven Years of Empty Storefronts Actually Looked Like
Menemsha's tiny commercial cluster along Basin Road has spent most of the last decade losing ground. The Bite, the fry shack many islanders still ask about, closed after the 2017 season and sat empty for seven years. The Menemsha Market, which had served boaters and the wider Chilmark community for 96 years before it burned, was badly damaged in an electrical fire in 2019 and never reopened. The Menemsha Deli, in a separate building on the same 10 Basin Road parcel as the old fish plant, had also gone vacant. For a stretch of years, the only places open on an ordinary Tuesday morning in Menemsha were the fish markets and, in season, the restaurants. If you wanted coffee before 9 a.m. or a loaf of bread on your way to the beach, you drove out.
That is the baseline worth sitting with, because it is the thing this fall's news actually changes.
The Deal Behind the Turnaround
The reason four separate storefronts are active again at roughly the same moment traces back to a single 2025 real estate transaction. Sarah Bernard and James Seppala, longtime Chilmark homeowners, bought the 10 Basin Road property, which includes the former Poole's Fish Plant and Chilmark Chandlery building, the old Menemsha Deli building, and a small cottage, for $3.1 million, according to the Vineyard Gazette's coverage of the sale. Rather than lease the space at market rate to whoever could pay the most, the new owners structured something unusual: a 99-year lease to the Martha's Vineyard Fishermen's Preservation Trust for the fish plant building, and a separate arrangement with Kevin and Liz Oliver, who had run the old Menemsha Market for 16 years before stepping away in 2012, then returned in 2017 only to see the market close for good after the 2019 fire, to bring back a grocery and deli in the former Menemsha Deli space.
The lease terms are not conventional rent. According to Kevin Oliver, thirty percent of the new store's net profits go directly to the Fishermen's Trust rather than to the property owners as fixed rent. It is a structure that ties the store's success to the trust's, and the trust's mission is entirely about keeping Menemsha's working waterfront intact as land values on the rest of the island climb.
"If this place can maintain its character as a working fishing village, it's the right thing," Oliver told the Vineyard Gazette when the store's opening was announced in late August.
The Basin Road Scorecard
Here is what has actually changed on that short stretch of road, building by building, compared with what a resident would have found there five years ago.
| Location | Before | Now |
|---|---|---|
| Fish plant building, 10 Basin Road | Vacant, former Poole's Fish Plant and Chilmark Chandlery | Martha's Vineyard Fishermen's Preservation Trust headquarters, on a 99-year lease |
| Deli building, same 10 Basin Road parcel | Vacant since the old Menemsha Deli closed | The Menemsha Store, run by Kevin and Liz Oliver, opening this week |
| Original Menemsha Market building, separate parcel | Damaged in a 2019 electrical fire | Still standing empty, not part of the 2025 sale |
| 29 Basin Road, formerly The Bite | Vacant from 2017 | Iggy's Bread, a seasonal coffee and pastry counter, open since 2024 |
| 56 Basin Road, Larsen's Fish Market | Rebuilt in 2022 | Reopened for the 2026 season |
Two things are worth sitting with in that table. First, the pace of change is not gradual. Nearly every dark storefront on this stretch has filled in the space of about two years, after sitting empty for closer to a decade. Second, the building most people call "the Menemsha Market" in conversation is still empty. That parcel was not part of the Bernard-Seppala purchase, and nothing in the current plans addresses it. The Olivers are back, and the name on the new awning nods to the old market's legacy, but they are running a different building.
What the Store Actually Offers, and Who It Is Really For
The Menemsha Store's menu is not trying to be everything the old market was. Kevin and Liz Oliver have described a lineup of coffee, baked goods, prepared foods, and made-to-order sandwiches, along with a small grocery section aimed at two very different customers: the sunset crowd heading to the beach with a blanket and a bottle of wine, and the fishermen who need something in hand before a 5 a.m. departure. The details lean into that dual identity. The latte menu is named after boats in the local fishing fleet, an idea Oliver said came to him on a walk around the harbor while he and Liz were trying to figure out what to call the drinks. The walls will carry Menemsha art from Liz Oliver's father's collection.
None of this replaces what Iggy's Bread already does a short walk away, where the Chilmark select board limited the menu to coffee, drinks, pastries, and bread only, with no sandwiches, pizza, or cakes allowed under the terms of its approval. The two businesses occupy adjacent but distinct roles, coffee and croissants at one end of the road, groceries and sandwiches at the other, which is closer to how the village actually functioned before 2017 than either place could manage alone.
Why the Fishermen's Trust Cares About a Grocery Store
It would be easy to read the Fishermen's Preservation Trust's involvement here as incidental, a nonprofit that happened to need office space at the same time a grocery store needed a landlord. The details suggest something more deliberate. The trust already runs a Seafood Collaborative, a wholesale operation that buys directly from Menemsha's fishing fleet and distributes the catch to local markets and to families who might otherwise go without. That program currently operates out of a 600-square-foot building next to Larsen's Fish Market. Moving into the larger former Poole's plant gives the trust real freezer and processing capacity for the first time, which its executive director, Shelley Edmundson, has said will matter for supporting a newer generation of Menemsha fishermen trying to build a living on the water.
Tying the grocery store's lease to the trust's revenue is a way of making sure that whoever profits from foot traffic in Menemsha also has a stake in keeping the harbor itself commercially viable, not just picturesque. It is a small, specific answer to a pressure every up-island town feels: how do you keep a working village working when the real estate underneath it keeps getting more valuable as scenery.
What This Actually Changes for a Tuesday Morning
If you live in Chilmark or spend real time in Menemsha outside of sunset season, the practical shift is this: you can now start a morning in the village itself with two different counters to choose from, something that has not been true since before the 2019 fire. Coffee and a croissant at Iggy's, or coffee and a sandwich at the new Menemsha Store. A grocery run for basics without leaving Basin Road. None of it rivals a full supermarket, and the empty shell of the original Market building is a visible reminder that not every gap gets filled just because the will exists. But the village that spent most of a decade defined by what used to be there now has a little more of what is actually there, on the ground, this month.
If you already know Chilmark's rhythms well enough to notice a lit window on Basin Road, you are exactly the kind of person we like talking with about what a home up-island is actually worth to you, whether that conversation is about a property you already love or one you have not found yet. You can read more about the town's character in our Chilmark neighborhood guide, and if you would rather talk it through directly, Studio Realty is glad to have that conversation. Request a private consultation whenever the timing feels right.
