A year has passed since Richard and Jennifer Schifter took a plunge into the Vineyard unknown and moved their 8,000-square-foot house away from an eroding Chappaquiddick bluff.
Looking back at the complex project this month, parties involved pronounce the project a success.
The Edgartown conservation commission grapples with an extensive landscape plan to restore the oceanfront Schifter property on Chappaquiddick where an 8,000-square-foot house was recently moved.
After about seven months of work and one highly visible house move that attracted national attention, construction work on the Schifter property on Chappaquiddick is coming to a close. A barge is expected to come into the Edgartown harbor this week to remove equipment and Richard Schifter said his family expects to spend Thanksgiving back in their relocated home.
About a year ago the Edgartown conservation commission approved emergency measures to stem erosion at the Schifter’s Wasque property.
After several days of inching forward along a deep, wide sandy trench, a Chappaquiddick home arrived late Tuesday at its new location farther away from a rapidly eroding bluff.
It’s been less than a year since emergency actions began to save the Wasque home of Richard and Jennifer Schifter. The key part of the project came this week with the move of the 8,300-square-foot main house.
On a misty, windy morning in April 2007 Chris Kennedy, Martha’s Vineyard superintendent for The Trustees of Reservations, had just returned from the part of South Beach in Edgartown known as Norton Point.
The night before Katama Bay had filled to overflowing by the flood of an astronomical high tide, topped off by the overwash and storm surge of a Patriots’ Day gale.
Early summer fog blew across the moors at Wasque Reservation last Saturday morning, a soft blanket of dampness settling over tiny, salt-blasted wildflowers. All was quiet. A short distance away was the place where fishermen once stood famously shoulder to shoulder, casting deep into the rip tides for blues. But few fishermen come to this spot anymore. What was once a wide sandy beach is now a sheer cliff in a land that has been under assault by a relentless ocean for the past six years.
A large house on Chappaquiddick inched slowly toward its destination this week across a deep, sandy trench at Wasque point, as early summer fog blew in and out and the ocean continued to eat away at a rapidly eroding bluff nearby.
Work progressed to relocate the 8,300-square-foot home owned by Richard and Jennifer Schifter.
The actual move got underway on Saturday. The project started last fall with discussions in town hall and began in earnest in March as a rapidly eroding bluff at Wasque threatened the Schifter home.
Work continues on a massive house moving project on Chappaquiddick following the discovery of an archeological site of interest that turned out to be an old refuse pit probably used by Native Americans centuries ago.
Project engineer George Sourati said the tribe suspected there could be a significant archeological feature at one location.
A complicated house move that has temporarily transformed part of Wasque from a secluded point at the edge of the sea to a giant excavation and earth-moving operation is well underway.
