RIP, Mill Hill Club

WEST YARMOUTH — Although decades of Mill Hill Club patrons have fond memories of the once-hopping nightspot on Route 28, it’s unlikely anyone will mourn its demolition, which begins today. The wrecking ball, set to swing at 8 a.m., is long overdue, town officials say. The building has been shuttered since the club’s closure in 2008. The site, located along the tourist community’s main corridor, is overgrown and has become an eyesore. “It’s sweet sorrow for many people,” said Linda Jean, executive director of the Yarmouth Area Chamber of Commerce. “But with the building in its dilapidated condition, nobody is sad to see it go.” Demolishing the building is one of the final preparatory steps in a plan to construct a 75-bed facility for Alzheimer’s and other dementia patients.

It’s with a heavy heart that I write this blog.  A heavy heart indeed.  Too many of the happiest memories from my misspent youth happened inside those walls for me to count.  If you ever spent a Happy Hour in the Mill Hill back in its glory days, no explanation is necessary.  If you didn’t, none will suffice.  It was the cultural, social, entertainment and sexual epicenter of the Cape for generations of horny drunken college aged kids.  You’d spend the morning priming the pump at Craigville Beach, then get to the Mill Hill by noon or so, before the line would stretch around the parking lot.  And as my buddy Davo once put it, the energy in the place was so thick you could cut it with a knife.  (Which I’m pretty sure is mixing metaphors, but I knew exactly what he meant.)  The place would be packed with massive herds of chicks who’d just thrown a sundress on over their bathing suits.  Guys in sunglasses and uglyass day glo Jams.  The DJ was always Gordie Miln or Jim Plunkett, playing the same dirty version of “Charlie on the MTA,” “Green Alligators” and the one about how firemen have the biggest hoses they played every week.  But someone every time you heard them felt like the first. I even had my first taste of real adulthood there, when a girl asked my friend Gerry “What is a guy your age doing hanging out in a club like this?  We were 23.  And it was there on the tail end of a 4 day bender where I’d blown an entire paycheck that I had an epiphany that maybe clubs weren’t my thing any more, and from then on it was dive bars for me.  You could almost say the Mill Hill is where I finally grew up.

It was a magical place at a magical time.  Like the city of Atlantis, mixed with Soddom & Gommorah.  And now, it’s faded into myth and legend.  But never to be forgotten by those of us who lived it.  Godspeed, Mill Hill Club.  This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.  @JerryThornton1