Each year the garden club chooses a different street or neighborhood to spotlight. Some years they're far flung. But the focus this year is a stretch of Union Street only a short walk from the ferry wharves. It's perfect for pedestrian day-trippers who want to enter the neat fenced-in gardens and shingled facades of this isolated island, which was always a world apart and has managed to stay that way. (Don't try to bring a car over. If you want to get to the beaches, rent a bike.)
The five houses on this year's tour started out old but have gained new owners, and, with them, professionally landscaped gardens, renovations, and expansions. But don't call them face-lifts. They're just the opposite, since preserving historic exteriors is all important here.
Even the world-class Whaling Museum at 13 Broad St. has been upgraded, and is well worth a stop. It reopened June 4 after a $14 million privately funded transformation under the vigorous leadership of Chanel president and COO Arie Koppelman, Dorothy Slover, and Geoffrey Verney. The enlarged museum has almost doubled its exhibition space, as well as restoring and reinterpreting its1847 whale oil candle factory.
But the showstopper is the skeleton of a rare 46-foot sperm whale that beached itself on Nantucket in 1998 and is now suspended in a dynamic arching position echoed by the lines of a new ceiling. Sperm whales were hunted to the brink of extinction to finance Nantucket's original Golden Age, which ended in the middle of the 19th century when coal and petroleum replaced whale oil as fuel. So local filmmaker John Stanton's documentary featuring residents mourning the death of this one whale as part of the display feels a little disorienting, like watching a paean to Native American culture in a museum named after George Armstrong Custer. But it necessarily registers today's radically different sensibilities about whaling, and the magnificence of these intelligent leviathans, even as it celebrates the skills of their Nantucket pursuers.
