A Philistine in the Shingle Museum

In the struggle between insiders and outsiders for control of Nantucket’s most prized resource—its quaintness—the righteousness of the combatants almost always correlates to their genealogy. Roggeveen, a Cambridge-born lawyer with a day job as the town’s conservation commission administrator, traces his family back to Tristram Coffin, who settled on Nantucket in 1659 along with Edward Starbuck. “We have relatives who’ve lived in these houses,” he says. “It’s not an abstract history. It’s personal to me.” He employs the term “mainland” as an all-purpose pejorative, dismissing something as “very mainland” or “a mainland development scheme.” When discussing 105 Main, Roggeveen repeatedly invokes the care with which his family has tended to its historic structures.

In DeSeta, Roggeveen had an almost perfect foil. And he rarely attempted to mask contempt for the wealthy newcomer’s philistinism. “I think he’s genuinely well-meaning and I personally like him, but he does not get the issue of historic preservation. He likes historic reproductions. And he thinks they are the same thing.” Roggeveen adds, “The redevelopment pressures on Nantucket are unprecedented even by the standards of the whaling period. Nantucket has done this before. The difference is that the people who did it before are people who live here, have their roots here, make their money here.”

When the HDC finally took up the matter of 105 Main on June 27, 2006, most of its members fell prey to the very “emotionalism” Roggeveen had asked them to avoid. “I know it’s more labor-intensive, but you have a significant structure,” said Valerie Norton, the only professional preservationist on the commission. “It just makes me want to cry when I go by it. It’s terrible. There are so many ways it could have been repaired instead of just demolished.” Alternate member John Wagley went even further. “I’ve known the Kilverts, they’re good friends of my family. I was probably four the first time I was with that building,” he said. “You’ve come in and done something so antithetical to the history of...our historic community.”

When it was Roggeveen’s turn, he took issue with the DeSetas’ “reductionist” legal argument that they didn’t require approval to alter the walls or foundation because those were part of the house’s interior. “To say that the HDC only has jurisdiction over the shingles—because that is the most exterior element visible from the public row—essentially says that the HDC has no jurisdiction whatsoever,” he said. The DeSetas’ attorney, William Hunter, countered that “this house has sat derelict for four years...the town of Nantucket could have bought it and restored it. The Kilverts, in selling it, could have at least put a historic-preservation easement on it, and they didn’t. The people that could have done things for this house didn’t. And the people that are doing something for this house stepped up [and] purchased it. It’s now private property, they are trying their best, and their intentions are perfect.

You may not agree with...their methods, but their minds and their hearts are in the right spot....Sitting in front of you tonight, listening to this, reading the stuff in the newspaper, watching these people being excoriated on Nantucket is simply unfair. The house was falling down, the house was coming down on its site.”

The heated discussion lasted an hour. At one point, Roggeveen said to DeSeta, “I’m sorry if you felt you were going to be applauded for the work you had done, but that’s not going to happen.” He suggested he was defending Nantucket from becoming Disneyland or Colonial Williamsburg, and compared DeSeta’s actions to buying an old painting and cutting it into little pieces. He threatened to force the DeSetas to file for a demolition permit; Hunter said they wouldn’t. But ultimately, Roggeveen was resigned to declarations of helplessness, begging Hunter to allow commission staff to look at DeSeta’s plans. “We don’t know what’s going on in the house,” he said.