News and Events for Nantucket Island
We should have guessed that we’d receive hundreds of entries to our 2021 Nantucket Photo Contest: after all, 2021 was a banner year for number of visitors! There was a record number of sunset and sunrise photos entered. It’s interesting (or maybe it isn’t) that we received a surprising number […]
Two popular fall annual Nantucket events that were cancelled last year due to the pandemic are being held this October, just not in their familiar formats. The Nantucket Island Fair, normally held over a weekend in Tom Nevers, is being replaced by a Fall Fun Day celebration on Saturday, October […]
Artists Association of Nantucket (AAN) and Bartlett’s Farm are again partnering: this time to keep the island’s popular Wet Paint Art Show open for a free in-person viewing. “In past years, during the week leading up to Columbus Day weekend, you could find our AAN artists en plein air painting […]
The sands are shifting in October. The cars depart downtown early, leaving the sidewalks to the leaves and gulls. The visitors still come to the beaches, and, on particularly warm afternoons when the sky is Canadian blue and the water rolls, the islanders will venture out for another visit. But that stretch of Nobadeer that had so many towels and bodies and surfboards lies empty. Your footsteps will stay for days.
There is a crispness in the air now as fall begins to settle in. Among the changing leaves and cooler temperatures, another change is happening. For our whitetailed deer population, fall is the most romantic time of the year: the rut.
The rut is the magical season when deer are breeding and more active than any other time of the year. Bucks have shed the velvet from their newly grown antlers and get aggressive with each other fighting for territory and female attention. The females go into estrus and everyone is “twitterpated.”
We love this time of year. As September rolls in, the crowds thin, the ocean is still warm, and the sun shines down on the long and lingering last days of summer. What’s more, it means we can score a table at a much-loved island eatery: Black Eyed Susan’s.
One of the first questions newcomers to Nantucket ask (after do people live here in the winter? and are there schools on Nantucket?) is often “does Nantucket have a hospital?”
The answer, of course, is a resounding YES. And thanks to years of dedication, determination, and dollars raised by generous donors and local residents, in February of 2019 Nantucket Cottage Hospital’s new facilities opened to patients. Thanks to an unprecedented $120 million capital campaign, the largest in Nantucket history, the new hospital was built entirely through private donations: debt-free, using no taxpayer dollars.
Envision Nantucket in 10 years. If you’re optimistic, you’ll be imaging our island with sea levels a foot higher than they are now.
Now envision our island community 30 years from now, with sea levels more than 3 feet higher. What can we do? How do we live with rising seas?
Envision Resilience: Designs for Living with Rising Seas is an exhibit that does just that: it presents visions of possible futures on Nantucket. Presented by Re- Main Nantucket upstairs in the Thomas Macy Warehouse at 12 Straight Wharf, this exhibit is the culmination of months of study, discussion, collaboration, and design called The Envision Resilience Nantucket Challenge.
Labor Day has crept upon us, tardy and idle. It slips up after the great tide of summer tourism has turned. Nobadeer has opened up, the waves are available at Cisco, and the surf fisherman can reclaim Madaket. Across the island, the traffic has eased. The weekdays remain crowded with pickups and vans, but you can make left hand turns on the weekends.
