A vandal is at large on Nantucket, an island better known for gray-shingle cottages, boat shoes and billionaires.
In January, someone apparently slashed a 947-foot-long structure of sand-filled tubes, designed to slow erosion of scenic Sconset Bluff. The damage to the project—on which homeowners spent about $18 million, and could cost another $2 million to repair—has inflamed a battle between people trying to save expensive summer homes teetering on the bluff’s edge and year-rounders who say nature should take its course.
“It’s shocking,” said Josh Posner , president of the Sconset Beach Preservation Fund. The group is trying to protect 80 houses on Baxter Road, an enclave with spectacular ocean views and named properties such as “Owl’s Nest.”
Members of the Hearst and Soros families own homes there, along with legendary commodities trader Helmut Weymar and Amos Hostetter , a Boston-based billionaire and philanthropist.
Erosion fights are raging on coastlines nationwide as sea-level rise and intense storms devour beaches and prime real estate. Few have been as entrenched as Nantucket’s.
The dispute involves lawsuits, testy town meetings and talk of class conflicts. Lifelong friends now find themselves on opposing sides, with one faction even accusing the other side of engineering a political purge of the island’s conservation commission.
And now, ahead of a May town meeting that could decide whether the homeowners can expand the geotubes project to protect more homes—someone or something has struck.
The Nantucket Police Department, which launched a probe, is considering all possibilities, including Mother Nature.
The Baxter Road group hired former Boston police commissioner Ed Davis to investigate cuts to the sturdy fabric tubes. His verdict: “This was in no way an accident or the result of natural forces.” The homeowners are offering a $10,000 reward to flush out the culprit.
“It’s a small island,” Posner said, “and it seems highly unlikely that whoever did this hasn’t spoken to anyone else.”
‘Class warfare’
For centuries, the ocean has threatened to swallow Nantucket, a pork-chop-shaped barrier island 30 miles off Massachusetts. Sconset, short for Siasconset, faces the Atlantic like the bow of a ship lashed by winter storms.
Erosion has already forced homes to be demolished or moved back over the years. For decades, the Baxter Road owners proposed various defenses to delay the inevitable, from a rock wall to dumping dredged sand, a plan rejected by fishermen. In 2013, the homeowners finally won approval to install geotubes on an emergency basis after a severe storm. The structures divided the island from the start.
“Everyone is mad at us—the quote-unquote rich people on Baxter Road,” said William Cohan , a journalist and former banker. He bought his summer cottage “House of Cards” about 17 years ago for $600,000 and since then spent roughly the same amount to move it 75 feet inland.
Now the Baxter Road group wants to add 3,000 more feet of geotubes to safeguard more properties. Though a town body approved the expansion last March, a Nantucket bylaw requires residents to approve use of town-owned land for erosion-control projects at the annual Town Meeting.
That critical May 4 meeting, where hundreds will gather at the high school to hash out island business, could determine the geotubes’ future.
Sconset homeowners argue that they are saving the town tens of millions of dollars by protecting Baxter Road itself. If the road is condemned, taxpayers could be on the hook for a new one, plus utilities. Property values along Baxter Road are already falling, and oceanfront homes account for a hefty portion of the island’s tax base.
“It is absolutely crazy that the town has resisted an effort by individual homeowners to protect their property and the road and public utilities with a technology that is now proven,” said Weymar, who is 89 and spends much of his time in Princeton, N.J.
He visited the island in 1958, skipping his Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduation ceremony to join his wife, who summered there growing up. In the late 1980s, they bought a decades-old Sconset house named “Twin Chimney.”
No one has pushed harder than Weymar to slow the erosion. He now envisions a future with a rock barrier at the base of the bluff—something opponents hate more than geotubes.
“I see this as a small number of very wealthy, really influential people who will not take no for an answer,” said D. Anne Atherton , a year-round resident. She lives in Squam, a Nantucket village reachable by an unpaved road, and helped to found the Nantucket Coastal Conservancy, in part to fight the geotubes.
She and others contend the geotubes were originally approved as a temporary fix. Their chief objection: They may protect Sconset but speed up erosion to the north by disrupting the natural movement of sand around the island.
That has been exacerbated, she said, by homeowners’ failure to comply with terms of the original permit, which required them to provide sand to cover the geotubes—sand that would naturally erode and nourish other beaches.
Posner says the Baxter Road group spent $13 million on so-called mitigation sand. But the homeowners admit they stopped providing the required amounts in 2021, two years after the town conservation commission rejected the geotube expansion. The newly constituted commission approved it last year.
Robert Greenhill , who owns a compound on nearly a mile of shoreline north of Sconset , is appealing that approval. He alleges the geotubes have accelerated erosion on his property, costing him more than 2 acres of beachfront.
Baxter Road homeowners, armed with their own experts, dispute this.
Tension has grown. Residents in Quidnet and Squam bought a full-page newspaper ad to protest the geotubes. Some locals speculate that the Sconset homeowners might have staged the vandalism themselves to gain sympathy. As one resident posted: “I’m sure the people with $10 million dollar homes only looking out for themselves didn’t make anyone mad.”
Hostetter’s main house, Owl’s Nest, has lost about 200 feet of dunes. A geotubes supporter, he owns two other homes, including a guesthouse where John Steinbeck , who wrote much of “East of Eden” in Sconset, once etched his name on a windowpane.
Asked why opposition has been so strong, Weymar said, “I think there may be a bit of class warfare going on. Those are fat cats in some people’s view, and they should not be helped.”
‘Strange things happen on Nantucket’
On tightknit Nantucket, the bluff debate has tested longtime ties. Ian Golding , whose parents owned “The Bounty” on Baxter Road, sat on the conservation commission and initially supported the geotubes, until the Sconset group failed to provide enough sand, among other things. He and Posner spent summers together as kids; the geotubes put them on different sides.
Both sides remember a past Nantucket—before the megayachts, “McMansions” and $100,000-per-couple political fundraisers. “It was like a park in those days, before it was discovered,” Golding said. “A fraction of the population. It was marvelous.”
Ian Golding, at his home in town, once supported the geotubes but later opposed their expansion. Kris Maher/WSJ
Golding now lives in a book-filled house in town but drove to Sconset one recent evening, noting homes that had been “tarted up” with additions. Today, tourists flock by the hundreds to the “bluff walk” directly behind some Baxter Road houses.
Posner’s house has an open-floor plan and wide windows facing the sea. Out back, he peered over the bluff, an 80-foot drop. Next door, 15 feet of the Weymars’ backyard disappeared this winter. A line in the grass showed where more of the yard is sinking. Posner jokingly called it the “Weymar peninsula.” Now it is gone.
At the toe of the bluff, the geotubes stretched out like a beached Leviathan. Upper rows sagged where damaged ones had lost their sand but the bluff was more intact. Unprotected areas showed fresh damage: irrigation pipes sticking into the air where land had broken off. A few houses hovered perilously close—5 feet or so—from the precipice.
Even the erosion-control viewing station slid away this winter. Geotubes opponents had dubbed it “propaganda point.”
Robert Benchley III is following the mystery. The family—including Peter Benchley of “Jaws” fame—goes back a century here. The Benchleys already moved their home back from the bluff once. He supports the geotubes, but harbors no illusions. Someday the ocean will win.
He isn’t sure what caused the damage. But after years here, he is certain of one thing: “Strange things happen on Nantucket.”
Write to Kris Maher at Kris.Maher@wsj.com and Gretchen Tarrant Gulla at gretchen.tarrant@wsj.com
