At the Montauk Lighthouse, a restored beacon shines again

Good morning. It’s Monday. Today we’ll find out why a crucial part in the oldest lighthouse in New York State has just been replaced with a 1902 part.

For more than 200 years, the Montauk Point Lighthouse on the eastern side of Long Island has pulsated like a huge swirling star in a tall bottle. Now, in an age when ships can track their positions with increasingly accurate maritime navigation aids, the lighthouse is a legacy of the past.

That includes the lens just installed in the glass-walled lantern room on top of the lighthouse. The lens is a huge, upright glass dish that rotates on its edge and focuses the beams of an LED into a single intense beam. It rotates six times per minute. It flashes every five seconds.

Tap, tap, tap, tap, flash.

The lens isn’t new: It’s the very lens that shone light on the water around Montauk from 1903 until 1987, when the Coast Guard removed it. The replacements required less maintenance, but some Montaukers grumbled that they were weak.

“I went there at night to take pictures of the lighthouse, and the lights on the outside of the building were brighter than the light inside the tower,” recalls Mia Certic, the lighthouse’s executive director. Montauk Historical Society. The group owns the lighthouse, which was commissioned by President George Washington in 1792 as one of the new nation’s first public works and built by John McComb, the architect who later designed Gracie Mansion.

The lens – named after French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel – made its comeback a few weeks ago through a pilot program with the Coast Guard and the Historical Society. Over the next few years, the association will collect data for the Coast Guard on the lens, one of 50 in service at lighthouses overseen by the Coast Guard as an official navigational aid.

Tap, tap, tap, tap, flash.

Certic said Fresnel lenses improved safety during the days of kerosene lighthouses, when sailors mistook distant lighthouses for distant boats and “didn’t realize they were heading for land,” often with deadly consequences. In the 1820s, Fresnel discovered how to place concentric grooves in the glass to generate a more powerful beam of light.

“It was a revolutionary invention,” Certic said. “The number of incidents of boats hitting the shoreline dropped immediately,” when lighthouses in Europe and eventually the United States installed Fresnel lenses. (Fresnel’s name is also known in theaters, where the principles of optics he developed are used in some stage lights.)

The Montauk lighthouse, the oldest in New York state, received a huge Fresnel lens in 1860, Certic said, but as the 20th century dawned, officials decided the lighthouse needed another. In 1902, a manufacturer in France made the newly reinstalled lens. The first mission lasted 84 years, until cost savings were its downfall.

“The Fresnel lens provides the best light any lighthouse can hope for, but it does require maintenance,” Certic said, and in the 1980s the Coast Guard turned to automating lighthouses. The concern was that Fresnels in unmanned lighthouses would not receive the attention they needed.

Tap, tap, tap, tap, flash.

The Fresnel lens was removed from the lantern room and did not get far: it was placed in the museum at the base of the lighthouse and remained there until the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s.

“People missed it,” Certic said — including historical society officials who, she said, campaigned to convince the Coast Guard to revive the Fresnel lens.

For the pilot project, the Historical Society assured the Coast Guard that the group was willing to maintain detailed records that could be used to establish new protocols for maintaining Fresnel lenses in lighthouses. In addition, the association had the lens restored and installed a new gear system, along with a new steel base. Most of the work was paid for with a $100,000 grant from the Ludwick Family Foundation from Glendora, California. One of the administrators spends time in Montauk, Certic said.

The Historical Society also promised the Coast Guard that someone would be present at the lighthouse, as in the days of shipwrecks and smugglers’ stories.

Tap, tap, tap, tap, flash.

Sensors now switch the light on at nightfall and off at dawn. And the lighthouse keeper — Joseph Gaviola, a former bank chairman and historical society board chairman — said he was playing an “ambassador role” at a destination for 100,000 visitors a year, “unlike true keepers of the past.”

“I wouldn’t want to be compared to the people who carried whale oil up the stairs,” he said.

Weather

Enjoy a mostly sunny day in the low 50s. At night it will be mostly clear, with temperatures dropping into the low 30s.

ALTERNATE PARKING

In effect until December 8 (Immaculate Conception).

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One more thing

Dear Diary:

I moved to New York City from my home in South Carolina in 1976 with the goal of becoming a freelance photographer.

I packed all my worldly possessions into a U-Haul truck and headed north. My wife, who was pregnant at the time, followed in our VW camper.

Eight months later, our son, Nicholas, was born at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village.

The next few years were a whirlwind of excitement and adventure. We used to live in the Village, on Jones Street.

Nicholas was a colicky baby and I received many disapproving looks as I carried him screaming through the nighttime streets of the village in the hope of calming him down.

Three years later we moved to Brooklyn Heights, which was almost like a suburb. We were on Henry Street and later on Lower Court Street.

A second child followed in 1982, but this boy from the South became increasingly dissatisfied with raising a family in the big city, no matter how much I loved living there.

Every time I returned to La Guardia from an out-of-town assignment, seeing the New York skyline through the window of a yellow cab on the way home stirred my heart and soul. But the truth was, I needed more room to move.

That’s why we decided to leave in 1987. A moving company loaded most of our belongings and we packed our Isuzu Trooper as tightly as possible while still leaving enough room for the four of us.

There was one thing we had to do before we finally said goodbye to the city.

We crossed into Manhattan on Canal Street, stopped next to a Sabrett cart and ordered four dogs. I got mine with mustard and cabbage.

—Charles West