On June 11, 2014, NJ.com (
visit link) ran the following story:
"NJ's oldest lighthouse still burns brightly at Sandy Hook
By Mark Di Ionno | The Star-Ledger
...
on June 11, 2014 at 8:42 AM
SANDY HOOK — It doesn’t have the imposing height of Barnegat Light, or a catchy nickname like Old Barney. It’s not a dark, mysterious castle, lording over the village below like the Twin Lights at Navesink.
It’s not an oddity, like Absecon, towering over an inland urban neighborhood in Atlantic City. It’s not the star of postcards, like the stark white, photogenic lighthouse on the lonely tip of Cape May Point.
It doesn’t have the Victorian charm of Hereford, a favorite of artists who paint from its surrounding gardens.
But the lighthouse at Sandy Hook has two titles that add up to Most Historic. It’s the oldest lighthouse in the nation, and the reigning champ of continuous service. This week it celebrates its 250th anniversary with a Colonial-themed public event this Saturday.
The beacon, built in 1764 out of a granite known as rubblestone, still shines its lights where Atlantic Ocean meets the Lower New York Bay. A 1,000-watt bulb, magnified through the prisms of an oblong Fresnel light, throws a light 12-miles out to sea.
"The only time it was dark was during the war years, when the lights were dimmed so the enemy couldn’t find the (New York) harbor," said Tom Hoffman, the National Park Service historian at Sandy Hook.
By war years, he means Spanish-American, World War I and II.
But it was the Cold War that kept the Sandy Hook light in the dark to most shore visitors. While hundreds of thousands of tourists climbed the towers of Barnegat and Cape May in the decades between World War II and the end of Vietnam, the Sandy Hook light was off limits.
"This part was still controlled by the Army," Hoffman said.
The light is surrounded by Fort Hancock, the first line of defense for the New York Harbor. From the retracting guns of 1890s, to the anti-aircraft nest of WWII to the Nike Missiles of the Nuclear Age, Fort Hancock was all about blowing up invaders. Not the kind of place you want people in flip-flops running around.
"In the beginning, nobody was really interested. People just didn’t know about it. But it’s become very popular."
When the Army turned its part of the peninsula over to the park in 1974, the lighthouse was opened to the public. Hoffman has been at the park since then, and says interest in the lighthouse has been slow to grow.
"In the beginning, nobody was really interested. People just didn’t know about it," he said. "But it’s become very popular."
A restoration in 2000 repointed the brick interior and left the stucco shell a bright white that still gleams in the sun. The keeper’s cottage, which dates back to the 1880s and is the museum for the lighthouse, was restored last year after it was damaged by Hurricane Sandy.
Jeremy Edmunds, the field supervisor for Wu & Associates, said the roofing, siding and chimney at the keeper’s house matched copper and masonry from the day.
"Historic preservation needs this kind of care so that these buildings will be around for another hundred years," he said.
This time of year, Sandy Hook is a parade of school buses, because the place is a 1,665-acre wonder of natural science and history.
It is a place of crazy duality.
On the one hand, it is wild and natural and lonesome. Sandy trails disappear into the thick dune brush, where poison ivy is a plant life staple, and there are stretches of empty beach on the north end. It can feel like the middle of nowhere.
On the other hand, the view from the lighthouse lanthorn on a clear day takes in parts of Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, Staten Island, and Middlesex and Monmouth counties — home to millions. It is, in fact, in the middle of everywhere.
And the lighthouse dates to the day when all those places, and the rest of America, were still under British rule.
The lighthouse was only the sixth built by colonists, and the only original survivor. During the Revolution, it was controlled by the British and guided their invading Army into New York Harbor. The patriots tried to destroy it several times, including a pre-dawn attack on June 19, 1776. Two cannons fired on the lighthouse, but the officer who led the charge wrote to George Washington that "the walls (were) so firm I could make no Impression."
That remains true today, a testament to the way it was built and shored up 100 years later, in the 1850s, when three-feet of brick were added to the interior walls. It is a monument for the ages and, according to park officials, a beacon of things to come.
The park service opened up a new round of inquiries into the re-use of Fort Hancock and has received 41 preliminary proposals, 14 of which are for residential development.
"We want to preserve historic buildings so that they can continue to serve the public in a new century," said John Warren, the park service’s public affairs officer. "The lighthouse shows that it can be done.'"