About a hundred people are standing on the wrong side of Route 28 in a gray drizzle, holding coffee. Across the street, behind a chain-link fence, sits a big brick building that has been empty so long the weeds have nearly finished it off. A yellow bulldozer waits beside it.
At about 8:05, police and town officials walk across inside the fence with sledgehammers, along with a few people from the business community. They swing at the old brick. Pieces come loose. Then the jaws of a wrecking crane come down and take the first bite out of the roof.
That was the morning of June 10, 2014, when the Mill Hill Club came down. CAI's reporter summed up the club's '70s and '80s reputation in one line: it "was as good a reason to come to Cape Cod as the beaches." Plenty of the people watching had first gotten in through the kitchen.
What nobody across the street needed explained was how hard this place was to close. The town had tried. The neighbors had tried. Even a fire had tried.
"Oh yeah… foggy ones"
If you were young on the Mid Cape in the '70s or '80s, you probably have a Mill Hill story, and it's probably a little out of focus. CAI asked Don Florio of Yarmouth that morning whether he had memories of the place. "Oh yeah… foggy ones," he said, laughing. He'd started coming in '78. "You'd see people standing in line all the way down there," he said. "And we'd sneak in through the kitchen."
The building was older than any of them. It started in 1924 as the Old Mill Tavern, a 40-by-40-foot room with dinners and dancing, according to the Historical Society of Old Yarmouth. Additions stretched it from 1,600 square feet to more than 8,500. The Mill Hill Club moved in in 1948. Carmine Vara bought it in the late 1960s, local historian Christopher Setterlund writes, and over the years the stage took Peter, Paul and Mary, B.B. King, the Grass Roots and Jonathan Edwards. In the early '80s, Black Flag played it. In 1979 the club put out its own live LP.
Kerry Jason of Yarmouth was in the crowd. "It's very sad, actually," she told CAI. Then the memories caught up with her. "Even the parking lot afterwards was just as fun as it was inside all night."
The selectmen took an hour a day
The neighbors had less fun. Starting in the late 1970s, residents complained to the town about club-goers parking anywhere a car would fit. In August 1982, Yarmouth's selectmen cut an hour a day from the club's schedule over liquor violations. In 1983 its licenses were suspended for a stretch.
That May, the building took its own shot at closing the place.
On May 18, 1983, according to the Historical Society, a fire started in the ladies' room and burned through to the roof. The Mill Hill Club was open again that night.
Nobody seems to have written down what started it. What did get written down is that a nightclub with a hole in its roof decided the night was still on. That's about as Mill Hill as a fact gets, and it goes a long way toward explaining how the club lasted another twenty-five years.
Dark by 2005, one day a week by 2007
When the end came, it came slowly. Henry Vara took over from his father in late 1985. Paul Hayden started DJing there in 1994. After the Station nightclub fire killed 100 people in Rhode Island in February 2003, the Yarmouth Fire Department ordered the club's combustible sound insulation fireproofed. By 2005 the Mill Hill was virtually closed. By December 2007 it opened one day a week for a few hours, just enough to keep its licenses. It closed for good in 2008, and town officials started calling what was left a blight.
Most of what goes when a room like this closes stays gone. In August we wrote about three Mid Cape dining rooms nobody can walk back into, and the Mill Hill belongs on that list. The Historical Society's archive kept a Mill Hill Club postcard. On demolition morning, a few people took home something heavier.
"Call it my life at the Mill Hill"
When the sledgehammers were done, Hayden grabbed one of the bricks they'd knocked loose and held it up. "I have mixed feelings," he told CAI. "Good to see it come down, but it's gonna leave a big hole in the landscape of Cape Cod." Of the brick, he said: "Call it my life at the Mill Hill."
Charlie Weatherbee worked at the club from 1968 to 1987. He told CAI he still heard about it from his older customers: "Oh, yeah, we went to the Mill Hill, we met there."
The hole Hayden worried about didn't stay open long. Mayflower Place had already unveiled plans for a memory-care building on the site. It opened in August 2017 as Mill Hill Residence, and today it's Maplewood at Mill Hill, an assisted-living and memory-care home at 164 Route 28. It still carries the club's name.
In 2020, Setterlund photographed what he identified as the club's old disco ball in the building's front lobby, "enjoying its retirement." The Historical Society reported it in the same spot in 2023. The building is people's home, not a museum, so please don't drop by to look for it.
The Historical Society also passes along a joke about the site. Some of the very people who partied at Mill Hill in the 1970s, it goes, could be living there now.
That changes how the 2014 photos look. A hundred people stood across Route 28 in the drizzle and watched their old room come down.
The joke says some of them just hadn't crossed the street yet.
Historical Society of Old Yarmouth | 229 Old King's Highway (Route 6A), Yarmouth Port · 508-362-3021 · [email protected] · hsoy.org · The society's Mill Hill history covers the Rainbow Ballroom and the club, and its archive holds a Mill Hill Club postcard. The archives office and library have public wifi, a copier and a scanner.