Stories from Ashore: A Nantucket Bicycle Shop Adapts

Jasper Young and Harvey Young outside Young’s Bicycle Shop December 2021.

At Envision Resilience, we support the exploration of science-based, design-led adaptation and we seek to amplify the anecdotal accounts of climate change in our communities. In this series, Stories from Ashore, we share stories of people in our Challenge sites who are rethinking and re-envisioning their connection to place as a result of a changing climate. Through these stories, we introduce you to people who are imagining a future with increased water, reshaping local food systems, harnessing alternative forms of energy and engaging in positive and hopeful conversations about the future. What will be your response to climate change?

By Charlotte Van Voorhis

Young’s Bicycle Shop, a family-owned and operated bicycle shop on Broad Street in downtown Nantucket, is no stranger to the threat of rising sea levels.

“My grandfather bought the building in 1938,” said Harvey Young, third-generation operator of Young’s. “The shop had never experienced flooding until the No Name Storm of 1991. That was a huge, historic storm—three massive low-pressure areas that met offshore and sat there for three days, with multiple tide cycles of floods coming in. I mean, it was the perfect storm.”

Harvey at the shop in 2021, with a family photo.

He recalled those tide cycles flooding Easy Street up to Broad Street, lapping at the edges of the shops and businesses. Each time the shop owners and neighbors would think, “Man, that’s a lot of water.”

And then the tide would go out. But the following day, it would flood a little further up the street. On the third day, Harvey’s brothers stood outside the building watching in disbelief as the water came pouring into the building at 6 Broad Street.

“But my whole life this street would flood,” said Harvey. “Broad Street was always flooding, but it had never come over the curb and up into the building the way it did during that storm.”

By the time they realized how bad the inundation of water from flooding would be, it was too late. The shop had 19 inches of water in it.

As Harvey explained, that was the same season that Hurricane Bob threatened the Eastern seaboard in the middle of August 1991. As a result of the forecast and projected path of the storm, the entire coast had battened down the hatches. And though it caused extensive destruction elsewhere, by the time it reached Nantucket, it was mostly wind and saltwater without too much heavy rain.

Because Hurricane Bob never made true landfall or caused significant damage on Nantucket, the island community sat into a false sense of security and was largely unprepared for the No Name Storm of 1991. While water filled the shop around them, Harvey’s brothers stacked as much gear and as many bikes as they could on cardboard boxes.

“But it was a mess, we had a huge flood sale after that,” said Harvey.

Harvey and his wife, Ellen, just missed that storm. They moved back to the island in December of 1992.

Fast forward to November 2021 and Harvey Young is outside his bicycle shop on Broad Street stacking sandbags. However, it’s the one time each year that the sandbags are more for festive decor than practicality. Since the 1990s, Broad Street has continued to see regular flooding. Most notably, over the last few winters when local high school students tested their luck in a kayak, almost making it as far up Broad Street as Stubby's.

Typically when the sandbags come out it means there’s a big storm or the potential for sunny-day flooding on the horizon. But on this particular day, Harvey is stacking sandbags to build a Christmas tree outside his shop. It’s the week of Thanksgiving and the island is buzzing in preparation for the annual Christmas Stroll festivities. Our team is at the shop working on the display window that Harvey has so generously donated for the month. Last month, the Nantucket Biodiversity Initiative featured their work and research in the window. For the last month of the year, Envision Resilience has taken over with Christmas lights and projections of sea level rise painted on the window.

Locally, Harvey has been following along as the Town of Nantucket and local nonprofits grapple with a changing coastline, increased flooding and the idea of more aggressive adaptive measures. Thinking about sea level rise begs the question, “What’s the plan for retreat?”

Harvey said that he’s “very comfortable saying the retreat word. I recently purchased a piece of land inland, further away from the water with the plans of someday, this [bike shop] needs to go there, if we’re going to keep doing this.”

“There might be an interim period where this building is used for something else and maybe Young’s has a much smaller footprint in the building while we’re still capturing the traffic, the location of this shop, which is awesome,” he said. “But maybe the model is more ‘we’ll rent you a bike and then put you in a shuttle to our offsite location.’”

While there are no plans to execute that idea any time soon, Harvey is trying to plan for all possibilities ahead of the curve. He doesn’t kid himself; “We’re not gonna hold [the water] back…when it decides to come.”

This change will be one of the challenges of running the bike shop that Harvey’s son, Jasper, will have to wrestle with. Jasper recently took over the business as the fourth generation of Youngs running the shop. Harvey ran the shop from 1997 to 2022.

The idea of change does not scare Harvey, who reasons, “We can all get stuck in our ways [But sometimes,] it’s just time for a change. So someday, who knows, the bike shop might not be there, it might be somewhere else. We’ll adapt. ‘Envision adaptation,’ right? Just like Darius Coombs asked of us.”

Whatever the bike shop’s future, the business has been a source of joy for Harvey and will undoubtedly be for Jasper as well. Over the past 25 years of running the business, Harvey has deeply enjoyed running the bike shop doing what he calls “the hospitality handoff.”

“I want whoever leaves my business… to be walking on a little cloud, to be in a good mood and when you walk into the next business,” said Harvey. “That effect ripples outward. When you get done with your bike, you might be tired, you’re probably going to be pretty satisfied and then you’re gonna go and get a good night’s sleep! That’s what we get to do.”

At the end of the day, Young’s Bike Shop is a prime example of Nantucket’s history of resilience and outlook for an adaptive future. What started in the 1930s as a bike and ice-skate shop has evolved and sustained itself for the benefit of the island, its residents and its visitors.

As Harvey quipped, “Thank you grandpa, Harvey.”