On Nantucket, $26.5m is fair trade for solitude
An only-on-Nantucket solution to a problem with a pesky neighbor: Pay a record $26.5 million and buy his land.
That's what happened this week in an uber-wealthy corner of this tony island, where an anonymous resident bought 9.5 acres of beachfront to stop a subdivision with four new mansions. It would have required the builder to pave a rustic, dirt stretch of Eel Point Road, a prospect that had neighbors and conservationists outraged.
"If you want to control what happens next to you, buy it," Richard J. Glidden, the lawyer who handled the sale, said by phone yesterday. "I've been practicing law here since '74, and I think it's the highest residential sale in the history of the island."
Records in the Registry of Deeds and at the Nantucket Land Bank showed no higher sale price for a piece of residential land. The plot stretches from the road to Nantucket Sound in low, undulating dunes thick with grasses, rockrose plants, and bluestem flowers. There is no house. No driveway. No beach cabana.
"I'm very excited," said Linda Holland of the Nantucket Land Council, who worked successfully to preserve 270 acres of nearby land. "To have the road tarred for a subdivision would have been so disappointing."
The land belonged to Eric Frost and other members of his family, records show.
After several contentious meetings at the Town Planning Board, the Frosts got the OK two weeks ago to build the subdivision.
While Glidden won't divulge the identity of his client, the lawyer said that plans for the four houses have been scrapped and that Eel Point Road will remain unchanged.
"Just a dirt road to the beach; that's how it started," he said. "Just now, the beach is surrounded by $20 million houses."
Glidden added: "Prices around here are getting so bizarre."
ANDREW RYAN 