Beach Road in Vineyard Haven is a busy place these days and not just because of summer traffic.

It’s a place where the state plans to spend five million dollars to upgrade the crumbling roadway to make it safer for bikes and pedestrians.

And it’s a place where dreams have been launched, like Ted Box’s hand-built scow Seeker just a few weeks ago.

This week another dream began to take shape with the news that a group is working to form a nonprofit and raise enough money to buy four prime harborfront properties owned by the DeSorcy family. With possibly eight million dollars to raise, the group has a long way to go. But the dream is exciting — to preserve, redevelop and grow the working waterfront that has long been a deliberately planned feature of the Island’s main port town.

The mission for the newly formed group is to continue the marine uses of the land and buildings, while promoting job preservation, job creation and year-round housing. The group would like to open up the property to tenants connected with science, oceanography and the arts.

Gannon and Benjamin, the iconic and widely respected wooden boat building yard that sits on one of the DeSorcy parcels, is perhaps the best example of what townspeople had in mind in the late 1990s when they adopted a district of critical planning concern — a special tool for overlay planning allowed through the Martha’s Vineyard Commission — for the area that rims the inner harbor from the drawbridge to Five Corners.

The 1999 designation by the commission outlined the following goals:

“To maintain and enhance the cultural heritage and economic vitality of the Vineyard Haven harbor and waterfront; to promote the year-round working waterfront and traditional waterfront industries and services; to promote pedestrian access along the waterfront; to protect habitats and water quality; to promote and protect shellfish habitats and fisheries; to maintain and manage the navigational resources of the harbor.”

While many of the traditional waterfront industries continue today, the area has also grown blighted in many places. Across the road the Hinckley family lumber yard has fallen on financial hard times and sadly is slated for sale at a public auction next month. Boch Park — the property owned by Ernie Boch Jr. that is not a park but rather a bare dirt lot surrounded by a chain link fence that Mr. Boch has inexplicably made off limits to the public — is just one example. Now the DeSorcy family — also long a presence on the Vineyard Haven waterfront — is ready to sell and thankfully will allow the Island group that has formed with its vision a first crack as buyer.

Islanders are well known for their ability to rally around community causes and preserve their unique institutions. In the 1960s they saved the rare, windswept moors at Wasque from the hands of developers. In the 1990s they gathered on the West Tisbury plains to raise a barn that is today the Agricultural Hall.

The working waterfront in Vineyard Haven is an institution that is surely threatened. Any plan for this stretch of Vineyard Haven harbor will need to account for rising sea levels, which will inevitably claim much of the coastline. But there is precedent in places like Portland, Maine, for revitalizing a neglected waterfront, and it is heartening to see people who care about the Vineyard maritime heritage unwilling to let it simply crumble away.

This is a dream worth supporting.