Demolition Permit Filed For Former Nantucket Electric Company Building On Waterfront

The utility company National Grid is seeking to demolish the former Nantucket Electric Company building located on New Whale Street along the downtown waterfront.

A demolition permit application was filed earlier this month for the old brick building that served as the processing plant for the coal gasification conducted at the site over roughly two decades by the Nantucket Electric Company.

Empty and in disrepair for years, the building now features large cracks through its bricks and broken windows, with the property surrounded by chain link fences. The structure “has reached the end of its useful life,” National Grid’s Marisa Pizzi wrote in the demolition application to the Historic District Commission. “The structure is in serious disrepair and poses a significant hazard and safety risk.”

Nantucket assessor’s records – along with Pizzi’s letter to the HDC – indicate the building dates back to 1875. But Dave Fredericks, the former manager of the Nantucket Electric Company power plant and a past vice president with National Grid, told the Current the structure is far younger and probably was built in the 1930s or 1940s.

After the power plant was closed in 1996 following the completion of the first undersea cable from Nantucket to the mainland, the brick building at 10 New Whale Street was gutted of its structural steel to house equipment associated with the remediation effort at the site. That included pumping and filtering groundwater in the area for 12 years, Fredericks said.

The building at 10 New Whale Street is part of a wider area along the waterfront that the town, along with other property owners including National Grid and Steve Karp’s Nantucket Island Resorts, previously targeted for potential redevelopment, including a possible parking garage. The former Harbor Fuel tank farm located nearby was demolished and removed in 2022.

While those ambitious plans have since fizzled and gone quiet in recent years, the town and National Grid have utilized a portion of the former Nantucket Electric Company property for the valet parking program operated by Valet Park of America.