The Pacific Club is Nantucket
Much more than exclusive men's room and cribbage hall
By Peter B. Brace + Independent Writer
Held together with worn bricks and dense yet crumbling lime mortar forming 18- to 14-inch walls hulking 30-plus feet over Still Dock, the Pacific Club stands stoic yet fragile at 15 Main Street.

Those who take notice of the two brick-and-stone buildings at either ends of Main Street downtown - the Pacific National Bank and the Pacific Club - might theorize some sort of connection between the two historic structures and that, like the bank building, much vaunted town father types built the 232-year-old brick Pacific Club for some higher purpose.

Nope.

For whaling company owner William Rotch, he needed to be on the waterfront and so built his commercial warehouse in 1772 as a base of operations for his four whalers: the Beaver, the Bedford, the Dartmouth and the Eleanor. Today's title for the building did not become a household name for another 79 years, but the underpinnings of the club itself came straight off the greasy decks of those whaling ships.

Cribbage, a card game invented by the English poet Sir John Suckling and played by Rotch's captains and crew in what was then essentially the employee lounge, happened in the William Rotch Warehouse with regularity as did endless hours of off-duty banter about past and future whale hunts, and life in general. The all-male "club" of whaling originated in the larger Captain's Room of the Pacific Club building next to the Club Car across the street from K. Taeger, Zero Main and the Lion's Paw.

ROB BENCHLEY/The Independent Built of brick and lime mortar, the Pacific Club is accessible to antique lovers and ATM cardholders alike. But only Club members with keys can access the second-floor cribbage room.

"When I was there, it was still in the old building on the first floor," said former member Jonathan Stover. "I recall there was a potbelly stove with major room areas. I would go down with my father-in-law, Charlie Flanagan, and play cribbage with all the guys. It was also very convenient place for an old man to stop and go to the bathroom downtown."

In 2007, more Nantucketers probably know this magnificent space as that building where the taxis are on its south side, for the tony bar and restaurant it shares a narrow three-and-a-half-foot alley with, and of course, the Bank of America ATM in the building's northwest corner. Now bearing the names of three of Rotch's ships on a green and white quarterboard facing up Main Street, the Dartmouth, Beaver and Bedford, the Pacific Club does not get nearly as much traffic as the bank does these days.

Fourteen of the 24 shareholders in the Pacific Club doing their damnedest not to break out in broad grins over having an all-male club to hang out in while standing next to the fabled giant coal stove in the Captain's Room of the club where they talked shop and played cribbage.

What once housed Nantucket's courtroom on the third floor, the chamber of commerce, a photographer's studio, a local television station, a telegraph office, a weather service outpost, a U.S. Customs House and regular cribbage tournaments is now a quasi-commercial space slowly being restored. In fact, all the action nowadays is confined to the ground floor with the cash machine, The Four Winds Craft Guild, Sylvia Antiques, and the rooms used by members who, more and more infrequently now, come by to play cribbage or use the bathroom.

COURTESY NANTUCKET HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION Because of a standard stipulation by the town when Whaleman William Rotch acquired his land from the Proprietors, the town was allowed partial use of Rotch's building once constructed. These included uses such as the town's courtroom on the third floor, above, as the first U.S. Customs House in the country and as an army telegraph office.

THE WILLIAM ROTCH WAREHOUSE

"School opens next Monday, cannot you come sooner? Miss Riddell has left," reads a telegraph to Mary E. Starbuck of 108 Henry St. in Orange, N.J. from J.C. Defriez on Nantucket on Nov. 23, 1887.

This and scores of other telegraphs saved by the Nantucket Historical Association were found beneath the Pacific Club floor boards from the days when the U.S. Army maintained a telegraph office in the building. Along with the William Rotch Warehouse, the three-story brick served several miscellaneous uses after the Rotch whaling empire moved out.

But there is no plaque or interpretive exhibit outside the Pacific Club building today narrating its history for passersby. Knowledge of this building is in the heads of its shareholders and members, now scattered around the country with just a few on Nantucket. A quick inquiry reveals that Rotch, who built Nantucket's first candle factories, and cribbage-playing whaling captains, operated out the building from when he built it in 1772 until he sold the building to Gideon Gardner in 1804.

Gardner's ownership of the building ended in 1831 when he sold it to the Commercial Insurance Company, which, following the Great Fire of 1846 that gutted the Pacific Club leaving only its walls standing, erected a new post - and-beam frame inside, added a third floor and made some door and window alterations, according to Yesterday's Island.

One year after Rotch's building went up, according to the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) done 1967 to 1969 citing ship charters listing cargo, provisions and equipment for three of Rotch's ships, after his vessels delivered whale oil and whale bone to London, England, the British East India Company chartered the Beaver, the Dartmouth and the Eleanor to haul tea to Boston. Three days after arriving in Boston on the night of Dec. 16, 1773, colonists led by Samuel Adams calling themselves the Sons of Liberty protesting England's three-pence-perpound tax on the tea, dressed as Narragansett Indians, boarded the ships and emptied all 342 crates of tea in Boston Harbor.

Ten years later, Rotch's fourth whale ship, the Bedford, making it to London in February 1783 bearing a load of whale oil, became the first vessel to fly the new colony's Stars and Stripes flag on the Thames River. Also around this time, the first U.S. Customs House began operation out of Rotch's warehouse, lasting until 1913.

MORE THAN GAMS AND CRIBBAGE PEGS

Part of the granting of land to Rotch from the

Proprietors of Nantucket, essentially the town,

included use of a portion of his building for federal and municipal use.

"…said House to be 18 feet wide and 40 feet in length; and the whole of the Lower Room and the north half of the Chamber in said House to be and remain forever hereafter for the use of the town all the rest of the remaining part of said House to be and remain to him, the said William Rotch and all his heirs and assigns…," reads part of the entry from the Registry of Deeds on Rotch's agreement with the Proprietors.

This provision, not unlike the aim of Article 25 on this year's Town Meeting warrant designed to protect water-related uses on the waterfront by requiring new construction and renovation to existing buildings to include public uses on the ground floor within a harbor overlay district, permitted the army's telegraph office and the U.S. Customs House. And it probably encouraged Joseph Brock, a president of the Pacific Club on Aug. 29, 1916 when, after the first telephone call between Nantucket and the mainland from the Great Hall in the Nantucket Atheneum, to engage in the first conference call on the island between himself at from club, William F. Macy in West Medford and the Honorable William Crapo in New Bedford.

Sixty-two years prior to Nantucket's giant leap into the world of telecommunications in July 22, 1854, the 24 shareholders of the building, 22 of which were former whaling captains, founded the Pacific Club, purchasing the brick whaling warehouse from the Commercial Insurance Company in 1861 for $1,205.

For 133 years, the club's integrity held solid like the building's brickand mortar shell, but in 1994 local maritime historian, the late Bud Egan made an attempt for a majority of the club's share's with the idea of refurbishing the building as he had done with the Coffin School on Winter Street, said Ginger Andrews, a share heir to her father, the late Clinton Andrews. A vote on the sale of the club's shares by its holders yielded just enough votes in favor of not selling their shares to Egan.

LOWER MAIN'S TIME MACHINE

The Pacific Club allows no women in the club or in the building except for in its leased portions. Paradoxically, the club's current president is female. Andrews inherited one of the club's 24 shares from her late father Clinton Andrews who got his from one of the original, founding shareholders, Clinton Parker, and is president by default because she lives on island year-round.

Now in charge of the club proper, but not the cribbage club, a subset within the club membership and probably outside of it as well, Andrews' work is more preservation of the structure and its historical aspects.

"My focus has been more preserving the artifacts and trying to get the building worked on," said Andrews. "Charlie Folger, a former president, did a quite a lot of work on the building. Some of the shareholders are very interested in keeping the club open and some of them who have their keys go in there and play cribbage."

With each share in the club and membership in the cribbage club comes a key to the building that can be used any time to get in and play cards on the second floor or use the bathroom. During the heyday of the Pacific Club, shareholders would crowd around a huge coal stove on a sawdust floor at street level for gams - a Nantucket whaling term for a conversation between two ships pulled alongside one another - and play cribbage.

"From the time I was a child, all it was ever, was for the guys to play cribbage," said Eileen McGrath, 83. "Other than, it was a really wonderfully warm place for people to [talk]. It was just for men. Woman wouldn't dream of being there."

Over the years, for upkeep and property taxes, the Pacific Club leased its space to a dog's breakfast of tenants including the Nantucket Chamber of Commerce from the early 1970s to 1994, Gene Mahon's Nantucket TV and Plum TV after that, and photographer Cary Hazlegrove's studio. Today, an antique dealer, a crafts shop and a bank are using part of the ground floor.

Funds from annual membership dues, which began at $5, jumped to $10 and are now at $100, pay the utilities, but Andrews is using the lease revenue to restore the building, namely its brick walls, which she said need major re-pointing. Last fall, she found a mason who can work with limebased mortar the Rotch Warehouse was originally built with instead of Portland Cement, which is known to be porous when hard, allowing water to seep in that can freeze and crack the bricks.

She expects to get him back this fall to continue his work. But restoring the cribbage games and tournament is, although many of the shareholders want it to happen, proving to be a challenge for Andrews.

"It's hard to turn the clock back because where do you turn the clock back to and it is equally hard to turn the clock forward because you don't know which direction people are

moving in," said Andrews. I