NHA
Burton Spruce Balkind
NCTV
From top left: Robert Seaweed Reed, a fixture of the early Box era; the weathered exterior of The Chicken Box on Dave Street; and longtime owner Rocky Fox, who carried the room forward; The Beat Drops, August 21, 2024, mid-set on Born to Run, with the stage barely a step above the crowd.
Seventy five years after Willie House opened a small fried chicken shack on Dave Street, The Chicken Box remains one of the island’s last rooms where everyone still mixes
Don Costanzo • May 6, 2026
The Chicken Box did not begin as a brand, a nightlife concept or a polished piece of Nantucket nostalgia. It began as a small fried-chicken shack on Dave Street, opened in 1949 by Willie House, a Black man from Kentucky who had come to Nantucket while working for a summer family. House remodeled a vacant building on what was then the edge of town and built a place around food, music and welcome. Long before it became one of the island’s most recognizable bars, The Chicken Box was one of the few places on island where Black people felt openly included.
That sense of inclusion wasn’t abstract. It was built the way much of Nantucket’s Cape Verdean community was built at the time: around food, shared space and an understanding that no one ate alone.
“The pot was never empty,” Fox recalls. “No one went hungry, that’s for sure,” he said in a 2022 oral history interview with the Nantucket Historical Association.
House’s fried chicken became part of the legend (Fox calls him the Black Colonel Sanders, "because he made some good chicken”), but the music became the foundation. The early Chicken Box was known for blues, jazz and soul, with House drawing on connections that reached beyond Nantucket.
Over the years, the room would be associated with names that sound almost impossible for a small island bar: Muddy Waters, Bobby Blue Bland, Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, The Temptations and Tower of Power among them. Not every early appearance is documented in the same way, and some belong partly to the oral history of the place, but that oral history is also part of what The Box is. It’s a bar with a paper trail, but also a bar carried by memory.
That memory is not just about who played there. It includes a version of The Box that functioned as something closer to a community hall than a bar. Fox remembers a time when families gathered for potluck meals and music, when kids were allowed in and the line between audience and performer barely existed.
“They used to have potluck… kids were allowed to come in and they’d have a jam session,” he says. Willie House ran The Chicken Box for 28 years before selling it in 1977 to Robert R. Reed, better known as Cap’n Seaweed.
“When he passed it on to Seaweed, he said, ‘I ain’t selling you the recipe,’” Fox says. “So that (fried chicken) stopped then when the second owner bought it.”
Seaweed kept the spirit of the place intact while pushing it in new directions. He had spent time in Jamaica and is widely credited with bringing reggae into The Box at a time when the sound was still unfamiliar to many of its patrons. His era helped cement the building’s identity as a roadhouse rather than a conventional nightclub: informal, durable, slightly unruly and built around the assumption that live music belonged there.
Nantucket Historical Association
Inside, and outside, The Chicken Box in the 1950s
The current era began in 2000, when Fox, Thomas 'Packy' Norton and John Jordin bought it from Seaweed. By then, all three were already part of the place. Fox had grown up nearby and had been coming there since childhood, first cleaning toilets and pinball machines, then working the door, then behind the bar, and eventually managing the business.
“I started at this door, moved up to this door, then got behind the bar as a bar back,” he says. “Then, I became the manager.”
The sale was not simply a real estate transaction. According to accounts from the owners, Joe Pantorno (longtime owner of the Club Car) and Jimmy Buffett had offered more money, but Seaweed chose the local group because he believed they would preserve what the place was.
That decision matters because The Chicken Box occupies a strange place in modern Nantucket. The island around it has become wealthier, more polished and more segmented. The Box hasn’t changed in the same way. It’s still a room where the summer visitor, landscaper, bartender, builder, billionaire, college kid, the musician and the year-round regular can end up standing shoulder to shoulder.
Fox describes it more simply: a place where “everyone seemed like family,” even when they weren’t. That idea comes directly out of the community he grew up in, where, as he puts it, “it didn’t matter whose kid you were, they were all your kids.”
National Trust for Historic Preservation
The music history is deep. Jimmy Buffett played surprise shows there. Grace Potter, The Wailers, Little Feat, Maceo Parker, Donavon Frankenreiter, Collie Buddz, Ziggy Marley, Blues Traveler, The Revivalists, Michael Franti & Spearhead, Lake Street Dive, Neal Francis, Maggie Rose and Andy Frasco & The U.N. are among the many acts tied to the room over the years. Setlist archives alone show repeated appearances by bands such as The Radiators, NRBQ, Grace Potter & the Nocturnals, Galactic, Matisyahu and Blues Traveler. The exact total number of performers is difficult to pin down, but it’s hundreds of acts across thousands of nights.
What makes those shows unusual is not only who played, but where they played. The Box is not a theater, mega-venue nor resort ballroom. It's a low-ceilinged, high-contact room where the distance between performer and audience is almost nonexistent. A national act that might otherwise play a festival stage or a large club ends up in a room where the crowd is close enough to become part of the performance.
The Chicken Box
Jimmy Buffett on stage at The Box, performing in the kind of close-quarters setting that defined the room; at right, Buffett with co-owner Packy Norton, an image that captures both the caliber of musician the Box drew and the personal, behind-the-scenes relationships that kept them coming back
The Box has also functioned as one of Nantucket’s unofficial civic rooms. It has hosted weddings, birthdays, graduation parties, nonprofit events, fundraisers and community gatherings. That role is not incidental. It reflects the same ethic that shaped the place from the beginning.
“I never considered not volunteering,” Fox says.
Over the past two decades, that mindset has translated into tangible impact. The owners estimate that The Chicken Box has helped raise more than a million dollars for local nonprofits, including the Boys & Girls Club, Meals on Wheels, Big Brothers Big Sisters, Nantucket STAR, Elder Services and Small Friends. That work is tied to something deeper than business. Fox traces it directly to the example he saw growing up.
“It takes a village,” he says. “I’m not sure there’s a village for it now, but that’s how we were raised.”
There is a temptation to describe The Box as a relic, but that misses the point. A relic is something preserved after its original life has ended. The Box is still active. It still books bands, hosts benefits, and pulls in people who would not otherwise share the same room. It has survived because each ownership era understood that its value was not in making the place more refined, but in protecting the lack of refinement.
That may be why it feels more important now than it did when it was simply part of the island’s everyday fabric. Nantucket has no shortage of expensive, private, curated, seasonal rooms. It has far fewer rooms where the island can still see itself mixed together.
The Chicken Box is one of them. And that’s the real story. It’s not just the oldest bar, the famous stage or the place where Buffett showed up. It’s one of the last durable public rooms on an island that has become increasingly hard to enter.