Massachusetts yacht club's foes fight for Grey Lady

NANTUCKET, Mass. — On a cloudless and unseasonably warm December afternoon, this small summer hub feels strangely abandoned, with few cars on the narrow roads and little sign of the 12,000 or so islanders who make their home here year-round.

The only full-service, deep-water boatyard on Nantucket Harbor — a warehouse complex of weathered, slate-gray boards just west of downtown, known as Grey Lady Marine — sits all but idle along a bay where a few stray scallop boats haul in their catches.

If developers get their way, the sleepy site will soon be reborn as a gleaming yacht club on more than 14,000 square feet of waterfront, with 40 slips for big boats, squash courts, a swimming pool, a restaurant and 400 members who pay more than $200,000 to join.

But on this preservation-obsessed island settled by English colonists in the 17th century, almost no such large-scale project comes without a fight. A small but organized group of neighbors and others with a different conception of what island life should be like is trying to stop the proposed Great Harbor Yacht Club in its tracks.

"Nantucket has become a playground for the rich, and that isn't going to change anytime soon. But this island has always been developed with a sense of proportion," said Moncure Chatfield-Taylor, a real-estate agent whose property abuts the yacht-club site. "What they are doing is totally out of scale for something that will only benefit a limited number of wealthy members."

Chatfield-Taylor, who has summered on the island since the 1950s and has lived here full time since 2000, co-founded a group called Save Our Waterfront that has lobbied town officials to deny the myriad permits needed to develop the property. The group has gathered more than 1,500 signatures on a petition, and its "Sink the Yacht Club" bumper stickers adorn vehicles parked on the island's cobblestone Main Street.

Opponents of the yacht club argue that 1,000 cars a day will create noise and gridlock on Washington Street, a two-lane road that would be the main access point for the new club. Dredging for a new marina, they say, would destroy eelgrass that serves as a valuable habitat for shellfish larvae. They also lament the destruction of the Grey Lady, which dates to 1917 and which, though long privately owned, has allowed the public to remove vessels from the water during storms.

The project has managed to navigate a gantlet of procedural and administrative hurdles, gaining approval for some of its structures from the town's Conservation Commission and Planning Board. At an April town meeting, a proposal that would have authorized $20.6 million for the town to purchase the land was overwhelmingly rejected.

Save Our Waterfront has appealed each of the permits received and filed a lawsuit against the town's Planning Board to overturn its approval.

Such disputes have grown more common on Nantucket, which has evolved from a 19th-century fishing and whaling center into a coveted vacation getaway for wealthy East Coast families, while occasionally wrestling with how to retain its historic character.

In 1996, after a seven-month battle, the town's Planning Board rejected a proposed supermarket after residents argued it would snarl traffic and rob the island of some of its cherished uniqueness.

As the island's population has doubled in the past decade — in the summer more than 50,000 people pack the 48-square-mile triangle of land south of Cape Cod — traffic and overdevelopment, especially of waterfront property, are greater concerns than ever. Last year, for the first time, more than $1 billion worth of property changed hands, and the average value of a single-family home has climbed 500 percent in a decade to about $1.4 million.

All of those changes, says Gary McCarthy, the leading developer of the yacht club along with partner Blake Drexler, show why it is no longer economically viable to leave a dilapidated boatyard on some of the nation's priciest property.

"Look, change is scary and it always concerns people on Nantucket, but I think what we're doing is a good thing. This is property worth more than $40 million, and you can't even pay the debt service on it by operating it the way it is now," McCarthy said. "There is a mile-long waiting list at the only other yacht club, and we have already sold 300 of the 400 memberships, so there is clearly a demand. We are working with the town to do it right."

Dirk Roggeveen, who chairs the island's Historic District Commission and is the administrator of the Conservation Board, said some of the criticism is reaction against the exclusivity of a new wave of private clubs developed in recent years.

Most, such as a golf club developed in the 1990s that reportedly sells memberships for more than $150,000, and a proposed tennis facility, have generated little controversy.

"The view you get from some people on the street is that this isn't what Nantucket should be all about, and that there's an insatiable demand for clubs because of people with so much money congregating here," Roggeveen said. "My family goes back 12 generations here, and I like the boatyard the old way. But as a public official, you have to step back and not just enforce what you'd like to see happen. There're plenty of people around here who think it's perfectly OK."