A Philistine in the Shingle Museum

As the commission proceeded with its bureaucratic machinations, local gadflies attempted to draw attention to DeSeta’s project through letters published in the Inquirer and Mirror, postings to the lively YACK online bulletin boards, and flyers appearing on telephone poles featuring a picture of 105 Main and the question have you seen this house? “That was real confirmation that it was good for us not to take on the project,” says BPC’s Joe Paul.

In 2000, the National Trust for Historic Preservation placed Nantucket on its list of the country’s “11 Most Endangered Places,” a designation blamed largely on “an upsurge in the destructive practices of ‘teardowns’ and ‘gut rehabs.’” It’s only due to the strength of Nantucket’s historic-district laws—and the acculturation of their underlying values—that preservationists aren’t terribly concerned that owners will tear down their historic structures entirely; at the same time, the island’s laws don’t go as far as statutes in New York City and Chicago, which allow publicly accessible interiors to be designated as historic landmarks. As a result, between 15 and 20 houses on the island lose their historic interiors each year, in most cases by fully legal methods, estimates Michael May, executive director of the Nantucket Preservation Trust. “Each of these houses has a history. If you’re completely gutting it and throwing it into a dumpster, you’re losing all the things it can tell you,” he says. “It’s like going into an archeological site with a bulldozer.”

Trying to convince new Nantucket residents of the versatility of old structures has not been easy. And when advising homeowners that it’s possible to adapt old utilitarian features for modern living, preservationists’ suggestions have often come off as perhaps a bit too clever: In 1999, in one example, May’s predecessor Patricia Butler encouraged residents to keep their back stairs—typically too steep to navigate, and in dimensions not up to today’s building codes—and use them as bookshelves.

May, who assumed his post last spring, just as the controversy of 105 Main was becoming a topic of island conversation, came to the job with a spunkier notion of how to engage the gutting problem on Nantucket. During a dinner discussion, May and his friends began riffing on slogans for the burgeoning crusade. He coined ‘Gut fish, not houses’ and decided to print bumper stickers with the phrase. Nantucket has a robust history of using the car as a billboard for activist propaganda. When residents wanted to protest a new retail development, they did so with ‘Bag the market’ stickers; during a speed-limit debate, it was ‘Twenty is plenty in Sconset.’ “It was a natural,” says May. “We wanted to encourage the discussion.” More than 1,000 of his stickers have been distributed, and prompted a response, naturally in adhesive form: ‘Fish rot, so do houses,’ which has appeared on trucks at the 105 Main construction site.

The commission’s battle with DeSeta over the house’s walls had come down, nominally, to the distinction between where exteriors end and interiors begin, as well as how one defines a demolition. It was an architecturally appropriate metaphor for the way Roggeveen saw the commission’s role in protecting not just buildings, but also “an indigenous architectural style, as opposed to something that’s imported.” For a century after the collapse of the whaling industry, the greatest tool Nantucket had in preserving its buildings was the inertia that accompanies economic depression. Since then, the island has been transformed not only into a high-end weekend destination, but into a place where visitors like the DeSetas decide they want to make their primary residence (the year-round population increased by 58 percent during the 1990s). “The question is how they will take their concept of personalizing into an authentic destination like Nantucket without ruffling feathers,” says Regina Binder, cochair of the building committee in Province-town, which has undergone similar changes. “Why is it we have to take our fancy lifestyle to the places where we go to get away from what we have [elsewhere]?”