Are newcomers with lots of money and little restraint closing the door on the true spirit of the island?

By Joseph P. Kahn, Globe Staff

ANTUCKET - Rob Benchley built his Siasconset home mostly by hand in the late 1980s, on a parcel of land handed down through three generations of Benchleys. Two years ago, the adjoining half-acre sold for a cool $1 million. Then, in a scene reminiscent of one of his grandfather Robert Benchley's tart social commentaries, Benchley was asked if he would mind moving his house to the other side of his Baxter Road lot - all expenses paid, naturally - so his new neighbor could throw up a king-size summer cottage with unimpeded ocean views.

''My wife and I considered the offer, but it seemed so unreal,'' recalls Benchley, shading his eyes from the bright morning sunshine. ''He was polite enough about it, I guess. But somehow uprooting our house and our lives didn't fit with what we thought living in Siasconset was all about.''

Benchley, 49, a freelance writer-photographer and year-round resident, isn't the only one blinking in disbelief at what money - seriously big money - and ego - seriously big ego - are doing to this tiny island's fragile socioeconomic order. Across the map from sleepy 'Sconset to windswept Eel Point, the mantra of Nouveau Nantucket boils down to one word: more.

More square footage. More voltage. More horsepower. More influence. More opulence. More privacy. More attitude.

''Nantucket was a nice, quiet community until Town and Country and W magazine started pushing it as the `in' place to be,'' sniffs Martha Walters, publisher of a society newsletter covering Nantucket and Boston. Walters, who has been part of the Nantucket scene since the 1930s, moved here permanently in 1970.

People of considerable - even stupendous - means have summered here for generations, she adds, ''but they never threw it around. Old houses that were beautifully done are being hauled off to the dump in pieces. The new money doesn't understand the old money. A `spend more, bigger is better' philosophy has taken hold.''

In a letter to the local newspaper last month, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Ned Rorem complained about the ''philistinism'' that has turned ''a paradise into a fairground.'' Rorem, who bought a home here 25 years ago, is considering selling and fleeing the island as plans move forward for a sprawling new house to be built next to his.

Says Rorem, ''Famous rich people are buying lots and putting up four-story houses now. And it's all about money, not love. If it isn't a moneymaking investment, they're not interested. I'm anguished about this.''

Which hardly makes Nantucket unique, it should be noted. The same howl can be heard in the Hamptons, Santa Fe, Napa Valley, coastal Rhode Island, parts of Cape Cod, and other resort areas that have become playpens of the super rich, summer camps for the profiteers of America's booming 10-Thou-Dow economy.

Bigger, faster, posher

The party crashers all want things bigger, faster, posher. If they don't come from Texas or New York, they act like it.

The old-timers wish the newcomers would mind their manners, or go someplace else. Houston in August would be nice.

But they are not going away. At least not on Nantucket, and not for the foreseeable future.

Instead, they're flying in for the weekend on private jetcraft, helping break records this Memorial Day as more than 3,500 flights and some 500 private planes turned Nantucket Airport into a mini-Logan over the holiday weekend. They're driving around this highway-challenged 40-square-mile island in roomy SUVs (Grand Cherokees, Range Rovers), creating traffic jams of unprecedented proportions. Shades of Newport, R.I., a century ago, they're stocking their climate-controlled wine cellars and consulting feng shui experts, while year-rounders load their pickup trucks onto the ferry and go shopping at Hyannis discount stores.

The Very Good Life is not always flashy, but it definitely isn't cheap. Vacationing CEOs (mostly men) golf at the tony new Nantucket Golf Club (membership fee: $200,000 and up). Their spouses browse for upscale accessories ($800 J. Hartmann suitcases, $300 Petite Faune children's dresses) that don't much fit with Old Nantucket's agreeably scruffy ways.

On an island suffering from a serious lack of affordable housing, the arrivistes retreat at the end of the day to their 8,000-square-foot waterfront ''cottages,'' complete with central air conditioning, and nail up No Trespassing signs to keep out the riffraff. So serious is the housing crunch that a whole new migrant work force has been spawned - to be immortalized in ''The Chardonnay Grapes of Wrath,'' no doubt - made up of scores of painters and carpenters flown in daily from the mainland. Those who live here find themselves cut off from fishing and clamming spots they've had access to for years.

Crime is negligible, nosiness frowned upon. The fences and signs go up anyway.

''Nantucket,'' sighs Benchley, ''is going from an island of benign trespass to one big gated community. What these signs say to me is `You can look over here - but you can't come in.'''

It isn't celebrity types for the most part who are putting up gates and throwing the social order out of whack, either. Certainly not like on Martha's Vineyard, which lost any sense of privacy or proportion long before the Clintons golf-carted into town.

True, the Giffords (Frank and Kathie Lee) did recently join the other Giffords (Chad, Dunn, and Jock) in Nantucket's unofficial social register. Clothing mogul Tommy Hilfiger, automotive king Roger Penske - VIPs, perhaps, but not exactly Kevin Costner and Michael Jordan.

More typical of the new breed are Wayne Huizenga, the Blockbuster Video billionaire who owns two homes on Hulburt Avenue and who zooms in in his own Boeing 737; Penske, whose massive new 24-acre complex off Pocomo Road reportedly includes a 2,000-square-foot garage; and Washington lawyer-lobbyist Max Berry and his wife, Heidi, who paid millions for a historic house near Brant Point lighthouse and promptly gutted it - quel horreur! - to build another that would qualify for the Carnival cruise line were it any bigger and closer to the water.

''There have been big houses here before,'' says Nantucket architect David Bentley, ''but not ones that sit there vying for attention like some of these newer ones do. Why does someone need 10,000 square feet of living space for six to eight weeks anyway? Contractors say that if you give them one more thing to do right now, they'll scream.''

Development restrictions

Nantucket, principally through its Land Bank, Conservation Foundation, and Historic District Commission, has battled to preserve wilderness areas and placed tough restrictions on new development. That's the good news. Expanded in 1971 to have jurisdiction over the entire island, the HDC has imposed a measure of architectural sanity that has eluded other ''in'' places awash in Wall Street money.

Size, scale, and amenities, however, are not subject to the same controls. And to many, that's the bad news.

Bentley, for one, views the demand for expensive design add-ons - au pair suites, media rooms, multi-car garages, swimming pools, manicured lawns - as symbols of the island's boisterous show-me-the-filigree mentality, the same combination of cash, brashness, and lust for la vida luxuria that seeded the fairways of the new golf club.

Without such a facility, he says, a segment of the megabucks crowd would simply not be attracted to a place as remote and low-key as Nantucket. With it, the men seem happy to let the women do as they please - splurging on waterfront mansions and catered cocktail parties, for instance - as long as they can play 18 holes a day and enjoy their privacy. Gone, according to Bentley and others, are the days when summertime Nantucket was a relatively classless society, despite the seasonal influx of wealthy aristocrats. When 'Sconset neighbors got together at impromptu beach picnics, heiresses chatted up hairdressers and artists schmoozed with scallopers.

''What bothers me,'' says Bentley, ''is a lot of these new people don't love Nantucket, but the idea of Nantucket. They could be living this way almost anywhere.''

While the Nantucket Golf Club has raised eyebrows (and summer rental fees) across the island, less is said about the wealthy wash-ashore who built a house adjacent to another Nantucket golf course - and then tried through his lawyers to block an addition to the club's tennis shop. Still apparently not satisfied, he tried to have the entire building moved from his property's sightlines in a bit of chutzpah that stunned many club members.

Then there was the appliance repairman who moved off-island after being followed home from work too often. The reason? With dependable help harder to come by than ever, impatient homeowners refused to take ''later'' for an answer. They took action instead, right down to stalking the poor fellow in his own driveway.

Competitive giving

Even the do-gooding is falling prey to one-upmanship, many here contend. Nantucket has about 8,500 year-round residents - and some 140 nonprofit organizations, which often provide access to Nantucket society. At last year's Nantucket Tree Fund benefit, according to Martha Walters, organizers were challenged about raising $30,000 when they could shoot for three times as much. ''Because that's all we need'' was a rationale deemed a tad retro by Manhattan standards.

This summer the Nantucket Historical Association is wooing a new group of benefactors to its annual August antique show. Ten dollars still gets you in the door to the fund-raiser, but to fly Patron class costs $5,000 a ticket.

''It's become a race to see who can raise the most,'' says Walters, adding with a laugh that for all the hundreds of thousands of dollars raised on behalf of Nantucket Hospital last summer, ''half the patient rooms have been turned into offices. If you're seriously sick, you're airlifted off the island immediately.''

As for the merchant class, Nantucket so far has shunned the trendy chain stores, keeping its cobblestoned streets safe from the Banana Republics and Sharper Images of the retail world. There's no Planet Hollywood lighting up Federal Street, nor even a Burger King.

But the retail mix has also become noticeably more stratified, many observe, as rents and labor costs have risen. Stores now cater to the T-shirt crowd or platinum-card set but not much in between. New stores of note include Susie Hilfiger's Children's Shop and Devonshire, an upscale furnishings and garden shop. Both opened last summer.

''It's easier to buy a windsurfer than a blow-up raft,'' acknowledges Nantucket Looms owner Elizabeth Winship, who flirted with selling her Main Street store last year yet plans to stay on. ''There are few mom-and-pop variety stores left, more high-end stuff like galleries and home furnishings. But this place was always sort of special.''

Gregory Souder, co-manager of the Nantucket Baggage Co. on South Water Street, winters in Aspen. He likens that resort town to Nantucket and says the seasonal populations often overlap.

''I see the same people in here all the time,'' says Souder, who is also a financial analyst. ''The Vineyard is more like Vail, more, well, plastic. Aspen is designed almost exclusively for the super-wealthy now, and that hasn't happened to Nantucket. Yet.''

One resident's headache is also another's bonanza. Designer Wendy Valliere of Seldom Scene Interiors has been in business here for seven years. Her current file includes two projects in the $1 million to $2 million range, budgets that obviously buy more than a handsome set of wicker lawn furniture.

''I don't like to mention clients' names, because they get hounded enough in the press as it is,'' says Valliere, defending the work boom as a boon for local tradespeople: ''They can make a great living now, not just a good one.''

Publisher Deborah Anderson's glossy new Home & Garden Nantucket magazine just hit the newsstands and is crammed with ads and articles pitched to the highest of the high-enders. Anderson insists she's more interested in history, horticulture, and architectural beauty than in trophy houses.

''The new money isn't impressing people here as much as they might hope,'' says Anderson. ''Yes, we have that kind of showy wealth, but the foundation of Nantucket goes on, and it's built on beauty and quality.''

Acknowledging change

Nicki Nichols Gamble and her husband built their home on Pocomo Road in 1991, after coming here for 15 years. At the time it was among the biggest private dwellings on the island. Today it isn't even the biggest house on the block.

''People still point to that as the beginning of the ruination of Nantucket,'' says Gamble, who will soon retire as president of Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts and hopes to spend considerably more time on-island.

''In that sense, Nantucket is ridiculous,'' she continues. ''If people want to buy and build within existing Historic District Commission standards, as we did, then what can you do? I'd like to live out there all by myself, but that's not reality. The reality is, Nantucket is changing and getting more developed.''

To really appreciate the change, though, it helps to sit down with someone like Linda Loring. Loring came to the island in the 1920s, making her a true child of Old Nantucket. Now widowed, she owns an apartment on Louisburg Square in Boston, a house in downtown Nantucket, and a 300-acre spread on Eel Point Road, the largest private tract remaining on the island. Loring bought her first parcel in 1957, 167 acres, for $5,000. Two years ago, her Eel Point property was appraised for $26 million - and may have doubled since. At least one prospective buyer proposed building another golf course there. She'd prefer to preserve the tract as a wildlife sanctuary, although taxes may make that problematic.

''I don't really know the new-money people,'' says Loring, relaxed and gracious as she sits on a drawing room sofa. ''But I must say, they pay little attention to detail. They make it easy to throw 4 to 5 million dollars away for a few months a year here.''

She smiles. ''You see that all over the island now. People saying, `I've got mine. Now stay out.' It's amazing how many people have different ideas, like someone trying to sell the idea that you can have a golf course and a sanctuary. I don't see how that's possible.''

Loring isn't completely opposed to the influx of newcomers (duck and deer hunters, yes). ''Resigned'' might be a better word. When her new neighbors unpacked and started clearing ground for a swimming pool and pool house - you know, that nice Gifford couple, the ones who talk about their kids on TV - she sent over a gift and a welcome note.

''I suppose I should meet them,'' Loring says politely.

Somehow, one suspects, she will.

This story ran on page E1 of the Boston Globe on 06/22/99.