Burton Spruce Balkind
For generations, one Main Street corner has been where Nantucket buys the paper, checks the board, grabs coffee, and runs into itself
Don Costanzo • July 14, 2026
There are places on Nantucket that become landmarks because of what happened there once — a shipwreck, a fire, a famous house, a vanished industry. The Hub is different, its importance comes from repetition.
People have stepped through its doors for newspapers, candy, postcards, coffee, souvenirs, and directions. They have sat on the benches outside and watched Main Street go by and scanned the bulletin board nearby for winter rentals, babysitters, carpenters, missing cats, and desperate pleas for housing. They have used it as a meeting place, a waiting place, a place to run into someone, and a place to be reminded that Nantucket, for all its change, still has a few corners where the old rhythms remain visible.
The Hub sits at 31 Main Street, at the corner of Main and Federal, in one of the most photographed and walked-over parts of town. That address is central to its identity. The store’s story is not one of relocation or reinvention in the usual sense. It has stayed put while the business around it has changed, adapting from an old-style periodical and news shop into a hybrid of newsstand, gift shop, coffee bar, snack counter, and informal civic commons.
Nantucket Historical Association
Left to right: The Hub on Main Street in the 1970s; With the familiar bench sitters out front; and a Mt. Vernon Farm truck loaded with vegetables for sale, where the bench holds its own cast of local characters, including Wilson Brown — known around town as “Brownie” — seated at center.
Two Beginnings
The story of The Hub appears to have two beginnings. The first came before it was The Hub, when the corner operated as Roger’s Periodical and News Store, documented in images from at least the 1930s. The second came in 1958, when the Nantucket Historical Association identified the first known reference to “The Hub” in an Inquirer and Mirror announcement, and when the Klingelfuss and McGlinn families reportedly took over the predecessor store.
From there, local recollections point to a Bennett-era in the 1950s and 1960s, including memories of a Mrs. Evelyn Bennet or Bennett connected to the store. Later, Scott and Debby Anderson are documented as owners through the late 1980s. Since 2001, Tess Anderson has been the owner, guiding the store through one of the most significant changes in its modern life: the addition of coffee, light food, and a more contemporary retail mix while preserving the feel of a familiar Main Street institution. For nearly seven decades under the name The Hub, and longer if its predecessor is included, this corner has served as one of Nantucket’s steady points of contact — a place where news, errands, gossip, coffee, and chance encounters all passed through the same doorway.
When a Newsstand was Infrastructure
The Hub’s name has always been more literal than clever. It’s a hub because of where it sits, what it sells, and what has circulated around it. For much of the twentieth century, a newsstand was not a nostalgic concept, it was infrastructure. Before smartphones and social media, places like The Hub helped organize the day. Newspapers and magazines arrived there. Candy, cigarettes, postcards, and small gifts filled the shelves. People stopped in not necessarily because they needed much, but because the act of stopping in was itself part of being downtown.
The earlier business at the address, Roger’s Periodical and News Store, suggests the original function clearly. This was a place built around print, daily habits, and small transactions. A person could come in for a newspaper and three bits of information picked up from whoever else was standing nearby. On an island, that kind of store does more than sell goods, it concentrates attention.
By the late 1950s, Nantucket was already changing. The island was no longer the whaling port of old memory, but it had not yet become the ultra-high-end seasonal economy that defines so much of its modern image. Downtown still served year-round needs in a more direct way. A news and candy shop on Main Street was not just a visitor amenity, it was a practical stop for residents, workers, summer families, and day-trippers alike.
The Klingelfuss and McGlinn families took over what was then Roger’s Periodical and News Store in 1958, which places The Hub’s formal beginning in the postwar period, at the moment when Nantucket’s modern summer economy was gathering strength and Main Street’s commercial identity was becoming increasingly tied to preservation, tourism, and seasonal ritual.
Nantucket Historical Association
Left: Roger’s Periodical and News Store at the corner of Main and Federal streets, circa 1930, before the storefront became known as The Hub. Right: The same downtown corner in the 1880s, when the building was already part of Main Street’s commercial life, with signs for periodicals, cigars, fruit, soda, and ice cream visible along the storefront.
A Corner With a Store Attached
The store’s appearance in historic images helps explain why it became so visually fixed in public memory. The brick building, the corner location, the projecting sign, the flow of pedestrians, and the benches nearby all made it part of the downtown scene. It was not hidden down a side street or dependent on a destination purchase, it was encountered constantly.
To understand The Hub, it helps to think of it less as a store with customers and more as a corner with a store attached to it.
The benches outside became part of the experience. Residents and visitors sat there to talk, wait, watch, eat, read, or simply occupy a piece of downtown without having to buy anything more than a coffee or a newspaper. In a town that can sometimes feel increasingly transactional, that kind of semi-public space matters. A bench in front of a small shop is not a park, but it can perform some of the same work. It gives people permission to linger.
That lingering is a major part of The Hub’s cultural weight. One person remembers sitting on the benches in front of The Hub during a first trip to Nantucket in 1970. Another recollection places an information table there during the first Earth Day, with mimeographed handouts and passersby invited to offer environmental suggestions. Others remember Sunday papers held in cubbyholes, waiting for customers who would slip inside, retrieve their reserved copy, and then go back out into town. These are modest memories, but that’s why they matter.
Most community institutions are not built out of grand events, but rather out of small repetitions. The same walk. The same door. The same counter. The same person behind it. The same bench. The same corner where something is posted, seen, discussed, and passed along.
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The Bulletin Board
The bulletin board outside The Hub may be the clearest example of that role. For years, the board functioned as a physical version of what social media would later become, only more local, more limited, and in some ways more honest. People posted what they needed. The Town of Nantucket even had a “Bulletin Board Etiquette Committee” in the 1980s and 90s that helped keep the board maintained and fresh-looking. That detail is almost comic, but it reveals something serious. A board like that only needs etiquette if enough people are using it, and only needs maintenance if it has become a shared resource.
Members of the Committee included Elizabeth Oldham, Alan Brown, Betsey Barvoets, Joseph Topham and Anna Hall.
On Nantucket, the categories of need posted on such a board are not incidental. Housing, work, childcare, trades, and lost-and-found notices are the mechanics of island life. They are also some of the island’s deepest pressures. To post a notice there was to turn a private problem into a public request. To read the board was to take the temperature of the community in real time.
A notice for a missing cat might sit near a flyer for a band. A babysitter offering help might be beside a family looking for housing. A carpenter might advertise availability beside a plea from someone who had lost sunglasses. Nantucket's Mary Mack found her husband on The Hub board when she saw an ad for a room available, tore off the number and called — "that was 35 years ago!" The mixture was the point. The board did not separate civic life from domestic life, or commerce from community, it put all of it in the same frame.
That’s why the bulletin board should not be treated as a charming side note in The Hub’s history, it is central to the story. Inside the store, The Hub circulated formal information through newspapers, magazines, books, and postcards. Outside, the board circulated informal information through handwritten notes, flyers, and local appeals. Together, they made the corner a small information exchange.
Nantucket Historical Association
Left to right: The Hub’s bulletin board packed with summer notices, including a flyer for the Frank Conroy Quintet at the Roadhouse, as Chris and Betsy Lowenstein look on; inside The Hub in 1998, with magazines, children’s books, newspapers, and morning traffic filling the store; and a reader outside the storefront, half-hidden behind the paper. Behind him in the window is a photograph of a sea gull bird by Beverly Hall; Below, L to R: Roberta Reyes, Matt Reyes (in her lap), Liz, and Jason Reyes on a bench outside The Hub, 1972.
Robin Reyes
Adapting Without Disappearing
The Hub’s business model evolved as the world around it changed. For decades, the print side of the business would have made obvious sense. Newspapers and magazines gave people a reason to come in regularly. But as print declined and downtown retail became more dependent on visitor spending, The Hub had to adapt.
By 2009, one outside observer still described it as a magazine and candy shop that also sold gifts and postcards. That description captures the older identity, or at least the lingering version of it. The modern turn came more clearly in the early 2010s. In 2012, Tess Anderson sought approval from the Select Board to offer take-out light food and beverages, including coffee drinks, muffins, pastries, cookies, and fruit. By 2014, a coffee bar with snacks, smoothies, pastries, breakfast, and eventual lunch service had been added.
The move made practical sense. Coffee gives people a reason to stop in every day. A muffin or bagel expands the morning crowd. Smoothies and cold drinks fit the summer traffic. Lunch adds another layer. For a store with limited square footage in a premium downtown location, the shift was not just cosmetic, it was survival. But what's important is that The Hub did not become a coffee shop instead of a newsstand and gift shop, it became all of those things at once. That layered identity is what makes it feel continuous. It speaks to visitors looking for something to take home, and to locals looking for something to get them through the morning.
A Downton Business in Miniature
In that sense, The Hub reflects Nantucket’s larger economy in miniature. It depends on tourism but cannot be explained by tourism alone. It sells the image of Nantucket, but it also serves the people who live and work inside that image. A tourist may walk in for a sweatshirt, a worker may walk in for coffee, and a longtime summer resident may come for a paper or the comfort of seeing that the place still looks like itself.
That ability to look like itself is not accidental. Nantucket’s preservation efforts has helped protect the physical setting that gives stores like The Hub their power. Main Street’s brick sidewalks, historic facades, human scale, and benches are not merely decorative, they’re part of the commercial and emotional experience of downtown. The Historic District Commission’s mission has long recognized that preserving historic settings supports Nantucket’s vacation-travel economy. But preservation also supports memory, and allows people to return to a place and find enough continuity to recognize their own past there.
The Hub benefits from that continuity, and contributes to it. The familiar sign, the double doors, the compact interior, the benches, the board, the corner itself — all of it works together. Even small changes, such as accessibility improvements or changes in merchandise, happen against the expectation that The Hub should remain recognizably The Hub.
Its resilience has shown up in practical ways, too. During the Christmas Stroll power outage in December 2024, The Hub was among the businesses reported to have stayed open on generators. In a downtown economy where Stroll is both ritual and revenue, that detail says something. The Hub is not just part of Nantucket’s postcard version of itself, it’s part of the working machinery of town.
Burton Spruce Balkind
The Hub today, at the corner of Main and Federal streets, where the bulletin board, benches, open doors, and steady sidewalk traffic still make the storefront part of Nantucket’s daily conversation
What Remains
Nantucket has changed dramatically around that corner. The downtown economy has tilted further toward luxury and seasonal spending, and newspapers are no longer the center of daily information. Housing searches have moved online, along with job postings, recommendations, complaints, and community alerts. Many small stores that once served ordinary daily needs have disappeared or been transformed.
And yet The Hub remains. That doesn’t mean it has been frozen in time, as the store that once revolved around periodicals and candy now also revolves around coffee, beverages, light food, gifts, and branded Nantucket retail. The bulletin board’s role has been partly overtaken by Facebook groups and digital platforms. The customers have changed, and so have the economics of Main Street.
But the core function is still recognizable. The Hub is a place where people cross paths. That may be the simplest explanation for its endurance. Nantucket has plenty of beautiful buildings, many shops and no shortage of nostalgia. What it has less of, especially downtown, are places that still feel like points of contact between the island’s different worlds.
The Hub compresses those worlds into one doorway, a bulletin board and a bench. The store’s name could hardly be improved upon. For decades, at the corner of Main and Federal, The Hub has been exactly that: a small center around which some part of Nantucket continues to turn.