Why has a harbor-front food stand next to a playground and a lifeguarded beach been so hard for the Town of Nantucket to keep running? On Wednesday the Select Board spent most of a meeting on that question. It was supposed to cover all of the island's town-owned beach concessions. The board did not pick a long-term fix, but it made the direction clear. The concession building at Children's Beach will likely stop being where the food gets made and handed over. If the board's current thinking holds, the building becomes storage and maybe a kitchen, and a food truck parks out front and serves the customers.
For anyone who walks to Children's Beach from Brant Point or Easton Street, that would change how the place works. It also explains a history that has looked like bad luck from the outside.
The Board Kept the Building and Changed the Question
Town staff came in with a blunt recommendation. They proposed demolishing or relocating the concession building, pouring a concrete slab with picnic tables, and bringing in a mobile restroom trailer and a food truck. The town estimated the slab at $150,000 to $250,000.
According to Nantucket Current, the slab idea "never received serious consideration" from the board, but the food truck did. Several members suggested keeping the existing building for storage, and possibly a kitchen, with a truck handling actual service. The Inquirer and Mirror described the same idea as turning the space into storage and refrigeration, with a food truck brought onto the site each day.
Select Board member Brooke Mohr put the plan in sequence. She favored "not doing a major project, not triggering the coastal resiliency stuff and trying with this next contract, the food truck model and see if it works before we do anything major to the building at all."
The formal vote was modest. The board will bid out one more three-year lease for the Children's Beach building before making major changes. The current contract is in its final year. Those three years now work as a trial period for the food-truck approach.
Fifteen Years, Several Operators, One Building
Seen as a timeline, the record in the town's presentation makes the building's case for it. Here is how Nantucket Current summarized the staff history:
- 2011. The lease went to a business called ACK Shack. It ended the following year when the operator left the island.
- 2013. The town couldn't find anyone willing to run the space, and it stayed closed.
- The next lease. The town canceled several promised renovation projects during the term, and the business refused to make its final payment, citing poor conditions.
- Hungry Minnow. The town lowered the rent, awarded the lease, and then waived the first payment because of the building's condition.
- 2020. The payment was waived again because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
- 2021. The final payment was disputed after another business operating there closed early.
- 2022 onward. The Surf, which also runs the Surfside Beach concession, took over and operates the Children's Beach stand as Gyp~Sea Café. Current describes this as a period of more stability.
The Inquirer and Mirror reported in January 2022 that The Surf's operators were Abby Shaw and Stacey MacEachern and that they had won a five-year lease running through 2026.
Every operator was different, and the problems were largely the same. The staff presentation listed what is still wrong today: the building's limited size, its poor condition, low electrical capacity, high operational responsibilities, and low foot traffic. A food truck answers most of that list at once. It brings its own kitchen, needs little from the building's wiring, and can come and go with the season.
The Arithmetic Behind the Hesitation
The board's reluctance to spend comes down to a few numbers.
The Children's Beach shack has brought the town $158,566 in revenue since 2017. That works out to less than $20,000 a season. Over the same period, the Jetties Beach concession operated by Sandbar has brought the town $1.67 million, roughly ten times as much.
The renovation estimates depend on the scope of work, and the two local papers presented them differently:
- Basic renovations to fix the building's problems could cost under $500,000, according to Nantucket Current's reading of the staff presentation.
- Coastal resilience compliance, which extensive renovations would trigger, adds $2.1 million to $4.6 million.
- The overall range reported by the Inquirer and Mirror for a major renovation is $2.5 million to $5.5 million.
Town park and recreation manager Charlie Polachi told the board that a major renovation would take 45 to 66 years to pay for itself. Staff recommended "operating a different model rather than making a multi-million-dollar investment."
Board member Bob DeCosta explained the low revenue in terms anyone who has walked down Easton Street will recognize:
"Children's Beach really only operates for two months. It's July and August. Nobody goes there for lunch because there's no parking, and if you walk there, you walk by the Strip, and there's seven stores on the Strip, so no one's going to go down to Children's just to have lunch. So it's really for the people that go to the beach there."
He put it more simply in Current's account: "To put $3 million into that building, it just doesn't make sense. It's never really worked at anything because of the location."
That explains why the board focused on the food truck. A truck matches the business to its real customers, the families already on the sand, without asking the town to spend money on a building that has never served much of a lunch crowd.
The Building's Historic Status May Change the Cost
There was one complication in Wednesday's meeting that could still shift the numbers. Town preservation planner Holly Backus said the Children's Beach concession building is considered a historic structure. That could exempt it from the coastal resilience requirements that drive most of the cost, and historic preservation funding may be available for work on it. The Inquirer and Mirror also reported Backus's caution that historic preservation rules might limit any plan to demolish or move the building.
So the historic status cuts both ways. It may block the cheapest option, the slab, and it may also make a modest renovation cheaper than staff first estimated. Keeping the building for storage and a kitchen fits both of those possibilities, which may be why the board found it the easiest option to agree on.
The building is also only one part of the site. In the town's concession bid document, the leased premises are described within a larger setting that includes the park, the bandstand, the beach, and the parking lot. The Nantucket Cultural District lists the venue as a harbor-side park with a playground, beach, bandstand, lifeguard, restrooms, showers, food service, and picnic tables. The bandstand was built by Army Reserve engineers, according to a 1995 Navy Seabee publication that also mentioned plans for new accessible playground equipment. None of those features depend on what happens inside the concession building.
A Food Truck Festival at Children's Beach This Weekend
The timing is a coincidence. Four days after the meeting, Children's Beach is hosting the 2026 Nantucket Restaurant Week Food Truck Festival on Sunday, October 4, from noon to 3 p.m. The Nantucket Island Chamber of Commerce is running it with the Town of Nantucket Department of Culture and Tourism. It's free and includes island food trucks, local makers, live entertainment on the Children's Beach bandstand, and lawn games. If the weather is bad, the rain date is Sunday, October 11, at the same hours.
Nobody has called the festival a test, and it isn't one. Still, it will show food trucks working on the same lawn the board was discussing, with the bandstand in use and the old building nearby.
What Next Summer Is Likely to Look Like
The next three-year lease may go back to The Surf, which currently runs both the Children's Beach and Surfside Beach concession buildings. If it does, the food itself may change less than the setup. The Gyp~Sea menu covers breakfast items like acai bowls, avocado toast, pancakes, waffles, French toast, and breakfast burritos, plus a lunch menu with the Surf Burger, the Crabby Patty of crab, shrimp, and scallop, a falafel wrap, salads, hot dogs, and fries. The café's website lists hours of 7:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., seven days a week, "starting June 5th," though the page doesn't give a year. Treat that as a typical schedule, not a confirmed one for 2027.
The details still to be settled are who bids, whether the truck comes daily as the Inquirer and Mirror described, and whether the building gets a kitchen or only refrigeration and storage. The lease length is already decided. The town has given itself three summers to see whether a food truck can do what six or more years of fixed-building operators could not do reliably. A larger renovation will depend on how that goes and on whether Backus's historic-structure exemption holds up.
Changes at town-owned spots like Children's Beach tend to affect the Brant Point and Easton Street blocks first, and in small ways that rarely make the listing sheets. If you own nearby or are thinking about the harbor end of town, Carl Lindvall is glad to talk through what a change like this means for your corner of the neighborhood. Let's Start a Conversation.
