Most houses between town and Surfside Beach do the expected thing: gray shingles, white trim, a gable or two, the kind of restraint that lets a house disappear into its own street. Then you reach the old life-saving station on Western Avenue, and the street stops making sense for a second. Steep Gothic roof pitches. An observation tower. Ornate arched trusswork that looks like it wandered off a rural New England church and got lost near the dunes. It has looked like this since 1874, and after six years of watching this building nearly become a hotel, then almost become town housing, then finally sit in limbo waiting for someone to decide what it was for, the answer turned out to be simpler than anyone expected. It is becoming a synagogue. But the more interesting fact, the one that explains everything else, is that its face was never actually up for debate.
Four Plans, One Roofline
The building was designed by Francis W. Chandler, a federal architect who later taught architecture at MIT, as one of four U.S. Life-Saving Service stations built to answer for shipwrecks off Nantucket's south shore shoals. It is the only one of the four still standing on the island. Crews worked out of it until 1921. It sat under Coast Guard use for a stretch, then became the Star of the Sea youth hostel, run for decades by Hostelling International, until the organization put the property on the market in the fall of 2020.
What happened over the next five years is really four separate proposals for what a 150-year-old life-saving station should become next, and none of them changed the one thing that actually mattered to the people watching from the street.
Blue Flag Partners, a Boston-based development firm run by Nantucket resident Terry Sanford, won a bidding war for the property with a $3.5 million offer in 2020, beating out a competing bid from the Egan Maritime Institute, which had hoped to fold the building into its Shipwreck & Lifesaving Museum in Polpis. Sanford's early plan was an updated hostel paired with luxury hotel units. By February 2023, Blue Flag had abandoned that vision and put the property back on the market at $7.9 million, more than double what the firm had paid three years earlier.
The Town of Nantucket stepped in next, reaching a purchase and sale agreement in December 2023 to buy the property for $6 million and convert it into seasonal lifeguard housing with additional year-round units for municipal staff. That deal needed a vote at Town Meeting, and in 2024, island voters said no. According to Nantucket Current's reporting on the article, the town's purchase was rejected 350 to 100.
So the building sat. And through a hotel that never got built, a town purchase that never got approved, and a stretch of pure uncertainty in between, the exterior of the Western Avenue life-saving station never changed. Not because none of its owners wanted to touch it. Because none of them were allowed to.
What Actually Held the Line
The reason traces back to a decision the Select Board made quietly in the aftermath of the 2020 sale: transferring the property's existing preservation restriction from the Nantucket Historic District Commission to the Nantucket Preservation Trust, a nonprofit whose whole job is holding easements like this one. A preservation restriction runs with the deed. It does not care who owns the building or what they meant to do with it. As Nantucket Preservation Trust executive director Mary Bergman put it, the easement means no changes can be made to the exterior appearance of the building without approval from both the Trust and the Historic District Commission, regardless of who signs the closing documents.
That single mechanism is why the gable arches survived a hotel plan, a town housing plan, and years of vacancy in between. Before any of that got sorted out, Blue Flag actually paid to have the building restored to comply with the restriction it was bound by, hiring island preservation carpenter Hollis Webb, owner of King Post Preservation, to rebuild the collapsing archwork by hand. Webb, who grew up on Nantucket, had been inside the building once before the job, as a firefighter responding to an accident at the hostel. He and fellow craftsman Kevin Green spent long stretches carving replacement white oak pieces in Webb's shop, saving what original trusswork could be salvaged and reproducing the rest to match. What came out the other side was not a renovated hostel or a half-finished hotel shell. It was the same silhouette Nantucket has looked at since 1874, just no longer falling apart.
That is the part of this story easy to miss if you only read the headline about a new owner. The building's next use kept getting reinvented. Its face never could be.
The Neighbors Who Bought It
In November 2025, the property sold again, this time for $4.5 million to a limited liability company called ACK Nightingale LLC. For months the buyer's identity stayed private. In April 2026, it came out that the purchasers were David Gregory, the former NBC News anchor, and his wife Beth Wilkinson, who already live nearby off Pochick Avenue, close enough to the old station that they had watched its ownership drama unfold from their own street.
Gregory and Wilkinson are members of Congregation Shirat HaYam, Nantucket's Jewish congregation, founded in 1983 and never once in more than forty years given a permanent home. Services and gatherings have moved around the island for decades, most often held at the Unitarian Meeting House on Orange Street. Gregory told Nantucket Current the timing and the building itself felt almost designed for this.
"Shirat HaYam in Hebrew means 'Song of the Sea,' and this is Star of the Sea, so it's pretty cool how those things align," Gregory said.
Shirat HaYam president Chuck Shoneman confirmed the congregation has been quietly working toward exactly this kind of permanent home for two years before the purchase became public. As of an August 2026 radio segment on WBZ NewsRadio, Gregory and Shoneman were still actively raising money from members and supporters to fund construction and build an endowment for the building's long-term upkeep, on top of whatever the preservation restriction already requires them to protect.
Because that restriction does not go away with new ownership. Whatever else changes inside, the congregation inherits the same limits every owner since 2020 has worked within:
- No alteration to the exterior roofline, gables, or archwork without sign-off from the Nantucket Preservation Trust and the Historic District Commission
- Preservation of the Gothic-style features original to the 1874 construction
- Continued stewardship of what Bergman has called her favorite historic building on the island, prized specifically because it never got smoothed into the standardized shingled look that dominates so much of Nantucket's newer construction
A Building That Kept Its Shape While Everything Around It Changed Jobs
What makes this a Surfside story and not just a Nantucket preservation footnote is how ordinary the surrounding blocks are by comparison. Western Avenue and Pochick Avenue are lined with the same low, gray-shingled forms you find all over this end of the island. The old life-saving station has never matched its neighbors, and for six years it was not entirely clear whether that distinctiveness would survive the market forces working on it: a hotel developer's math, a town budget vote, an open listing at $7.9 million. It did survive, and the credit belongs less to any single buyer's good intentions than to a piece of paper filed years ago that none of those buyers could undo.
If you walk or bike past it on the way to Surfside Beach this fall, you're looking at the same arches Webb spent months carving by hand, now on their way to becoming a sanctuary rather than a hostel bunkroom. The congregation is still early in construction planning and still raising the money to get there. But for the first time since 2020, the building has an owner who wants exactly what the easement has always protected, which may be the first time in its recent history that the legal restriction and the actual plan for the place have pointed the same direction.
Surfside changes in smaller, quieter ways than the rest of the island most years. This is one of the bigger ones, and it happened to a building most people only ever glance at on the way to the water.
If you're curious what else is shifting in this stretch of the island, or you're thinking about property near Surfside Beach yourself, the team at Sanford & Sanford knows this neighborhood block by block. Buy, Sell, or Rent with Sanford & Sanford.
