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For one thing, lots of new businesses that had cropped up in the past year were disap-
pearing. I had lived on Nantucket long enough (not to mention an eight-month stint in Key
West in the late '80s) to know that the rhythm of vacation resorts—essentially feast or fam-
ine—isn't always a great recipe for commercial success.
But I was shocked at just how fast restaurants and other businesses were springing up
in Vieques and just as quickly taking a nose dive.
Our realtor, Armando, had opened a restaurant a few months after we bought our house
and we watched it go belly-up barely six months later.
The Wyndham Resort , which had opened with such fanfare around the time of our first
visit to Vieques, failed miserably and was taken over by another company. Then the island
rumor mill really kicked in and reported that this new incarnation was also tanking and
would soon be replaced with a W Hotel (the Caribbean's first). The latter rumor proved to
be true, although the hotel's opening date was pushed forward at least four or five times.
The W finally opened in the spring of 2010.
An amusing corollary to the W story is that American Airlines decided, once the hotel's
plans were announced, to expand its American Eagle service to Vieques to accommodate
all those posh new visitors the hotel was certain to attract. American got so excited it even
footed the bill for a new wing of the airport.
This was big news indeed.
The island was serviced by a group of small, locally-owned, airlines with the exception
of Cape Air , which flew a bunch of its small planes down to the Caribbean every winter
since they weren't being utilized to any great extent in New England in cold weather.
Now a major airline would be connecting the island with San Juan. Everything would
change, nothing would ever be the same again. Or so the story went.
The new airport wing, sleek and stylish, was completed after about a year.
Islanders held their collective breath waiting for the first flight.
It came.
It went back.
Then the service was suspended indefinitely.
In the end, nothing changed at all.
But a couple of relatively new establishments in Isabel seemed to be thriving. One was
a small sandwich shop on the right hand side of the winding road leading into town.
Jane had told us it was wonderful. We bought sandwiches our first day and took them
to the beach. Yum.
The other new business was almost directly across from the sandwich shop. We had no-
ticed the building before—frankly, it's hard to miss—looming high above the other struc-
tures on the left hand side of the road as you enter town.
It's a wedding cake of a building, all Corinthian pilasters and crown moldings, infin-
itely more ornate than any other structure on the island. But when we'd first visited the
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