3 North Beach Street

Town records give 1930 as the build year for the house at 3 North Beach Street. That date does something useful: it drops the house into a cohort the Town of Nantucket has been trying to document. In November 2023 the town advertised for a historic properties survey of the Brant Point and Cliffside neighborhoods, and named its focus outright, the cottages built there from the 1880s through 1950. The same document defines the neighborhood by four streets, and North Beach is one of them, running from the harbor end of town out toward Jetties Beach.

By 1930 the ground here had been summer ground for two generations. The first harborside cottage went up in 1881 on Hulbert Avenue, built by Edwin Hulbert, a mining engineer from Middletown, Connecticut. The island's first seaside hotel, The Nantucket Hotel, stood at Brant Point from 1883 to 1906. In 1885 a Washington hotel man, Henry A. Willard, cut a twenty-seven-lot subdivision off Easton Street; the lots sold inside three years and the cottages and bungalows followed. The town's own account is that the stretch from Willard Street to North Beach Street filled in as a dense summer enclave. This house is part of that fill.

The listing describes a private widow's walk with a full circle of Brant Point from the top. Nantucketers do not use that phrase. The Nantucket Historical Association records the widow-watching origin as sentiment rather than fact, and notes that as early as 1925 the head of the island's historical society was insisting these had always been called plain walks and nothing else until quite recently.

The documented use was practical and slightly alarming. Chimneys on wooden houses threw sparks, and roof fires were common enough that leather buckets of sand were kept by the hearth. The walk was how you got to the chimney in time. The rest of the year it was a platform for watching the harbor, and for anyone with a telescope or an interest in weather. Because the house dates to 1930, this particular walk is not a whaling-era survivor. It is the island's oldest working idea, built into a twentieth-century summer house.

The property is a main house and a detached cottage on 0.14 of an acre: eleven rooms and 3,838 square feet between them. The main house carries five bedrooms and four baths, the cottage one and one, and the two together sleep thirteen. The record shows a renovation in 2005 and a second round of renovation and decoration in 2022.

What is in it is plain enough to list. A wood-burning fireplace. A sun room. A separate dining room. An open island kitchen with a six-burner gas range. A full basement with the laundry in it. Outside, a fenced yard, a private drive with two spaces, and a back patio built out with a gas grill, an outdoor kitchen, and a fire pit. The roof walk is reached from inside.

What the walk looks at is the most rebuilt piece of infrastructure on the island. Brant Point Light was established in 1746, when the merchants and mariners of what was then Sherburne voted at town meeting to mark the point every vessel had to round to reach the inner harbor. By the Town of Nantucket's own account it is the second-oldest lighthouse in the country, after Boston Light, and the oldest in Massachusetts.

It has also been knocked down and put back up more than any other lighthouse in North America, by the reckoning of lighthouse historians. The first one burned in 1757. The second went down in a storm in 1774. The tower standing there now dates to 1901, and it still works. Everything on the island's exterior, this house included, sits inside the Nantucket Historic District, established by special act in 1955, extended in 1971 to cover the whole island plus Tuckernuck and Muskeget, and designated a National Historic Landmark on November 13, 1966.

The house rents by the week, not by the month. Summer weekly rates start at the figure shown above; Compass renders that number in its monthly field, but the listing remarks on the same page state it as a weekly summer rate.

The listing went live on May 16, 2026, carries an available date of June 23, 2026, and shows as available now. Remaining weeks and exact dates are confirmed through the listing agent, Beth Dickerson of Gibson Sotheby's International Realty, on MLS 73520191.

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