Swampscott's Historic District Commission has permit power over the town-owned Fish House

← All news · August 12, 2026

The town has spent three years weighing whether to elevate, relocate, repair, or move the Fish House. Article IX, Section 7 puts the building inside a Local Historic District and bars any building or demolition permit, including one issued by the Town itself, until the Historic District Commission grants a certificate.

Swampscott has spent three years weighing whether to elevate, relocate, repair, or move the Fish House. The town’s own bylaw puts the building inside a Local Historic District and bars any building or demolition permit until a separate Historic District Commission grants a certificate.

That power comes from Article IX, Section 7, a preservation section in the same general-bylaw article as the demolition-delay rule. It says: “No building permit for construction … or for alteration … and no demolition permit for demolition or removal of a building or structure within a district shall be issued by the Town or any department thereof until a certificate … has been issued by the commission.”

The rule binds private owners and the Town itself. It also reaches more than demolition. The bylaw defines “to alter” to include “the moving from one location or position to another,” so relocating a covered building needs commission review too.

The Historic District Commission’s permit power

The Historic District Commission is not the Historical Commission that heard the 11 Eulow Street roof raise and the 39 Puritan Road teardown this summer, and that meets again Thursday to decide them.

The Historical Commission works under Chapter 40 and Article IX, Section 4. When it finds a building historically significant, it can delay demolition. Nancy Schultz chairs it; Jonathan Leamon and Brad Graham sit with her.

The Historic District Commission works under Chapter 40C and Article IX, Section 7. Its authority is not a delay. It is a precondition to a permit. Richard Smith chairs it; Jer Jurma is vice chair.

As this paper reported Aug. 12, the Historical Commission’s delay has more force than it first appears: it freezes new construction on the lot and holds the demolition until every replacement approval and appeal is done. But that process ends in a permit. The Historic District Commission can stop a covered project before a permit issues.

Certificates, timelines, and appeals

Inside a district, a covered project needs one of three certificates before the building department can act: Appropriateness, Non-Applicability, or Hardship. The commission has 14 days to decide whether it has jurisdiction, 45 days to hold a hearing, and 60 days to rule. If it misses the 60-day mark, unless the applicant grants more time in writing, the bylaw issues a Certificate of Hardship Due to Failure to Act. Silence approves, as it does under the demolition-delay bylaw.

The board has five members appointed by the Select Board, plus up to two alternates. Three make a quorum, but issuing a certificate takes a concurring majority of the members. A denied applicant can ask for review by an arbitrator the Metropolitan Area Planning Council designates, or skip that and appeal straight to Superior Court within 20 days.

The bylaw excludes paint and roof colors, at-grade walks, landscaping, solar panels, and work a public officer certifies is needed for safety. Its fine is up to $300 a day. The larger force is the permit gate: without the certificate, the permit does not issue.

The Fish House is in one of four districts

The bylaw lists four district areas, each bounded by a map on file with the Town Clerk that the town does not publish and this paper has not seen. One is the Frederick Law Olmsted district, where every case the commission has heard this year sits. Another, by Appendix 2, is the Swampscott Fish House Local Historic District: the town-owned building on Fisherman’s Beach.

A Planning Board member familiar with the commission put it plainly on the record last September: it “also sits over the Fish House, uh, the train depot and the cemetery.”

Any town plan to alter, relocate, remove, or demolish the covered Fish House structure would need this commission’s certificate before a permit could issue.

Three years of Fish House plans

At a Select Board meeting in February 2024, the Harbor and Waterfront Advisory Committee’s pier advisor described storm surge undermining the Fish House foundation and noted the failing town pier rests on the Fish House’s own footer. Asked whether testing had confirmed structural damage, he said he did not know that it had.

The committee’s plan was to move the replacement pier off the Fish House frontage toward Chace Park. The pier is now more than a decade past its design life, likely built no sooner than 2030 at a cost the advisor put between $4 million and $20 million, doubling if it is lost before it is replaced. The advisor framed the underlying choice as defend or retreat: if the town believes “the fish house is iconic enough to save it for future generations, then we have to defend”; if not, retreat means “moving the fish house out of there … turning that waterfront into a park.”

In October 2025, the Select Board backed installing seven “Climate Futures” signs along the shore, with no recorded opposition. Sign No. 6 tells passersby that “responding to escalating threat of higher floodwaters, the fish house is relocated to preserve its historic value.” A board member cautioned that the dates on the signs are an educated guess from FEMA maps and state planning horizons, “not perfect dates,” and that relocation “can mean vertical relocation as well as physical relocation … we’re not really defining what that is.”

Three weeks later, a joint capital session took the opposite tack: repair in place. The FY27 facilities list flagged the Fish House for masonry chimney rebuilds, window refurbishment, and constant siding and trim work, because the building “takes a real beating.”

In January, a climate committee floated moving the Fish House to the Hawthorne lot as a museum, “solving 2 problems” at once.

Elevate, relocate, repair, or move it uphill to a museum: none of the posted records for those discussions names the Historic District Commission, a certificate, or Chapter 40C.

The commission’s 2026 record is thin

The commission’s 2026 docket, across every agenda from January through the Aug. 3 posting, lists boiler vents, replacement windows, a porch enclosure, and retroactive heat pumps, all at Olmsted-district house addresses. No Fish House, Depot, or Cemetery case appears on any of them.

Its March 2 meeting ran on a bare quorum: members Tony Sanchez and Andrew Steingiser and alternate Sylvia Belkin present, while the chair, the vice chair, and members Ingrid Strong and Stacey Reiling were all absent.

The commission posted minutes for its first three 2026 meetings, January, February, and March, all received by the Town Clerk in one May 8 batch. It has posted none since. Its per-case application folders sit behind a Microsoft login the public cannot open; a resident can see that a case exists but not its plans. The commission has never appeared on the town’s video record.

Vice Chair Jurma also sits on the Planning Board. The masthead still prints Douglas Thompson as the commission’s liaison, though a Doug Thompson left the Select Board in April; whether it is the same man is unverified, and the town has not corrected the line.

The records fit the pattern this paper has tracked all summer: the town’s land-use decisions increasingly leave little a resident can open from home.

What the record does not show

Much here is a gap, not a finding. The bylaw’s adoption date is not in the recovered text. The district map is not published, so nothing here says how far any district reaches. Whether the commission has ever taken a Fish House, Depot, or Cemetery case is an absence in the posted record, not proof that none exists. Whether the town follows the bylaw’s own rules for nominating members and filing its organization is unchecked. And whether Section 5’s clause making Chapter 40C prevail in a conflict governs Section 7 at all is unsettled.

What the record establishes is narrower: the town wrote itself a permit gate that binds the town, put its own Fish House inside it, and has spent three years discussing that building’s future without naming the board whose certificate those plans would need.

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