Jaws Never Left Martha’s Vineyard
On the last day of August 2026, lifeguards at South Beach in Edgartown pulled a swimmer in her twenties from the water with leg wounds that the state's shark biologist later attributed to a sandbar shark. The water was closed for the afternoon, and Martha's Vineyard found itself living out a scene from Jaws.
Unlike the unfortunate woman in Steven Spielberg's shark movie, the victim of the island's first recorded unprovoked shark bite survived.
Yet thanks to Spielberg, the bite made headlines within a day. News desks from ABC World News Tonight to Good Morning America covering it and how could they not, when Spielberg turned this Massachusetts vacation destination into Amity Island for Jaws in 1974, he knew he was playing on a common fear of sharks, and great whites in particular.
What he couldn't have predicted was the impact the film's success would have on Martha's Vineyard. More than 50 years later, people still pose on Edgartown's main street, at the Chappy Ferry slip, and on the Jaws Bridge. The beaches are all still here, and so, it turns out, are the sharks.
How Edgartown Played Amity
Most of what audiences remember as downtown Amity is Edgartown, the old whaling port on the eastern end of the island. The street corner where Chief Brody buys paint and plywood for his "Beaches Closed" signs is the junction of Main Street and South Water Street.
The interior of the hardware store was shot a block away at Main and North Summer streets, in the building that's now The Port Hunter restaurant.
The Amity police station was the house at 36 South Water Street, since renovated, and the town meeting where Quint drags his fingernails down the chalkboard was filmed inside Edgartown Town Hall at 70 Main Street. The meeting room has since been remodeled, but the hallway looks the same.
The bank at the corner of Main and South Water streets was Edgartown National Bank in 1974 and appears in the film as the Amity Bank. It's a Rockland Trust branch today, and worth popping into for a photo of its Amity Bank sign from the film shoot.
One of the vessels that appeared in the movie is still in service. The ferry on which Mayor Vaughn lectures Brody about "boating accidents" is the Chappy Ferry, which takes three cars and a handful of passengers 527 feet across the mouth of Edgartown Harbor to Chappaquiddick Island. Its two boats, the On Time II, which played the Amity ferry, and the newer On Time III, have both worn Amity name boards for anniversary events.
Galleries, Hotels, and Tours
Across Dock Street from the ferry slip, the Old Sculpin Gallery, a former boat shop now run by the Martha's Vineyard Art Association, was the building production designer Joe Alves based Quint's shack on.
Spielberg's film crew based itself at the Harbor View Hotel on North Water Street. The hotel opened in July 1891, and in 1974, then-owner Bob Carroll asked for (and got) a $25,000 deposit for the 50 rooms the production team needed.
The hotel faces the Edgartown Lighthouse, a 45-foot cast-iron tower built in 1881 for Crane Beach in Ipswich and barged to Edgartown in 1939 after a hurricane wrecked the original. The Martha's Vineyard Museum looks after it and opens the tower in summer.
To get the lay of the land and to have filming locations pointed out, book a tour with the Edgartown Tour Company. Its one-hour Amity walking tours cover the scenes shot in the town center.
The free SetJetters app, promoted by the island's chamber of commerce, matches film stills to the streets for those who prefer a self-guided option.
The Jaws Bridge
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The film's best-known beach scene is the death of Alex Kintner on his yellow raft. It was shot at Joseph A. Sylvia State Beach, a 2.2-mile barrier beach along Beach Road between Edgartown and Oak Bluffs, and both the beach and the south inlet into Sengekontacket Pond feature prominently in the film.
The gazebo, hot dog stand, and lifeguard tower in the film's Fourth of July sequence were sets.
Halfway along the State Beach, the American Legion Memorial Bridge is now known to locals and visitors alike as the Jaws Bridge. This is where the shark slips under the bridge and into the "pond for old ladies," and Brody's son Michael goes into shock after watching a man killed in the estuary.
The original bridge in the film has since been replaced by a new structure on the same spot, and jumping off it is something of a tradition, despite posted signs telling people not to.
The Vineyard Transit Authority operates a bus between Oak Bluffs and Edgartown that stops at the bridge. For an up-close look from the water, Island Spirit Kayak rents kayaks and paddleboards on the pond side. Roadside parking is available, and there are no restrooms, so plan accordingly.
Chief Brody's house is at 265 East Chop Drive in Oak Bluffs and is a private home that has since been rebuilt, so if it's a must, do a drive-by.
Menemsha in The Spotlight
The sea scenes aboard the Orca were shot in open water off Oak Bluffs and East Chop. These scenes were to prove the most troublesome as the three mechanical sharks, all nicknamed Bruce, kept failing, causing the production to run more than 100 days over schedule and to double its budget.
Quint's hunt for the great white sets sail from Menemsha, a fishing village in the town of Chilmark on the western side of the island. His shack, with its rack of shark jaws, was the only building the production put up on the island.
Chilmark's building rules meant the shack couldn't stay, so the crew took it down after filming and returned the lot to the condition they found it in. The lot's still empty, and the harbor behind it looks much as it did on screen, which is why the island's Jaws bus and boat tours finish here.
It's still a working harbor, with a commercial fleet and charter boats in the basin, and two fish markets on Basin Road. Larsen's Fish Market at number 56 steams lobsters to order and sells chowder, stuffed quahogs, and crab cakes from a takeout window.
Menemsha Fish Market next door at number 54 adds stuffed scallops and lobster bisque to the list. Both are takeout only, and most customers carry their order to the lobster-trap picnic tables on the dock or down to the beach.
The Real Sharks
While Jaws was, thankfully, fiction, Edgartown's shark protocol isn't. When that shark bite occurred this past August, swimming at South Beach was suspended for several hours while officials checked the water. Such closures for sightings occur most summers on the island's south shore.
In August 2022, lifeguards cleared South Beach for two hours after a shark was seen five to ten yards off the sand, and in May of this year, a dead gray seal washed up on Lucy Vincent Beach in Chilmark with a shark bite.
The sharks are great whites (referred to as "white sharks" by most scientists) on the hunt for seals. Research suggests that 800 individual great whites visited the waters off Cape Cod between 2015 and 2018, which puts the outer Cape among the world's largest gathering sites for the species. The animals tend not to linger in Vineyard waters and instead pass through on their way to the seal colonies off Chatham and Monomoy Island.
Attacks are relatively rare. The International Shark Attack File at the Florida Museum of Natural History confirmed 65 unprovoked shark bites worldwide in 2025 with 25 in the United States. None of them, though, were in Massachusetts, and the state has recorded only one fatal attack in the past 90 years. This occurred in September 2018 when 26-year-old Arthur Medici was killed by a great white while boogie boarding 30 yards off Newcomb Hollow Beach in Wellfleet, on the outer Cape.
It's worth noting that great whites can hunt in five or six feet of water. So, stay close to shore, keep away from seals, and get out of the water when lifeguards tell you to.
Definitely Not Jumping the Shark
Martha's Vineyard was chosen as the setting for Jaws purely by accident. Production designer, Joe Alves was on his way to scout Nantucket when the boat he was traveling on was canceled mid-trip, dropping him on Martha's Vineyard instead. What he found was an authentic New England island with a harbor town that could pass for Amity.
It also had shallow water offshore where the film's mechanical sharks could be filmed with the horizon in frame, as well as residents willing to stand on a beach and scream on cue.
More than 50 summers later, the Chappy Ferry still makes its 527-foot crossing, the Jaws Bridge still has a line of teenagers waiting to jump off, and Larsen's still steams lobsters a few steps from where Quint's shack stood.
