Island Native Leads Restoration Of Surfside Lifesaving Station

After years of wear and tear, the historic former lifesaving station and Star of the Sea youth hostel in Surfside has received a major restoration.

“It had been neglected as a youth hostel, but the history of the building itself is really cool,” said Hollis Webb, the owner of King Post Preservation, Inc., who led the restoration project. “The ornate gable archwork was obviously collapsing from the street. Once I had an opportunity to work on that building I jumped on it.”

The building dates back to the 1870s, when it was built as one of four U.S. Life Saving Service buildings, where crews would monitor the ocean from Surfside Beach and respond to distress calls from sailors. The structure is the last of those four buildings remaining on Nantucket, though parts of the former Madaket station were moved to Brant Point in the 1940s following the opening of Coast Guard Station Brant Point.

The Surfside building has a specific style that was common for U.S. Life Saving stations, complete with the iconic gable archwork. Restoring it meant hours on end carving white oak in Webb’s shop. Old wooden pieces that had deteriorated were replaced. Others that had fallen were saved, some serving as templates that could be reproduced.

“That's right up my alley,” Webb said. “I had never worked on anything that complex. It's something I really wanted to jump on.”

Webb, as well as Kevin Green—who also worked on the restoration project—has been involved in multiple restoration projects on Nantucket. Both Webb and Green attended Boston’s North Bennet Street School on the Nantucket Preservation Trust’s Mary Helen and Michael Fabacher Scholarship.

Restoration has become a passion for Webb, an island native and a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. For this project, Webb estimates that 60 percent of the material was replaced. The rest was original. While he was able to use modern power tools in the restoration, he said his goal is to stay true to the architectural integrity of the original work.

“It's not to say new buildings don't have their own elements of craftsmanship, but these buildings were largely produced by hand,” Webb said. “It was post Civil War, and real rudimentary power tools were just starting, but they did this as efficiently as they could with hand tools and did it in such a way with a skill that isn't done anymore.”

The property has a preservation restriction, meaning no exterior changes can be made that would alter the architectural integrity of the 1872 building. The Nantucket Preservation Trust holds that restriction.

The restoration work is being paid for by Blue Flag Partners to comply with the existing preservation restriction.

The building in Surfside has also had a tumultuous recent history of rescinded purchase agreements, grand ideas for hotels, employee housing, and one proposal that would have seen it used as an education center.

It caught the eye of multiple entities starting in 2020 when Hostelling International put it on the market after decades of ownership. Blue Flag Partners ultimately won a bidding war for the Surfside property, beating out a competing offer from the Egan Maritime Institute, which had hoped to use the building as an extension of its Shipwreck & Lifesaving Museum in Polpis. Blue Flag Partners had hoped to convert the hostel into a hotel.

But by February 2023, Blue Flag Partners said it planned to sell the property, asking $7.9 million for the 0.69-acre site. Several months later, the town reached a deal to buy the Western Avenue property for $6 million, hoping to use it as town employee housing, though the purchase agreement was contingent on a subsequent appropriation at Annual Town Meeting. That vote failed, and the town walked away from the purchase.

Blue Flag has once again put the property on the market. It is now listed by J. Pepper Frazier Co. for $5.49 million.