Little Red Lighthouse
by Joan Carroll
Title
Little Red Lighthouse
Artist
Joan Carroll
Medium
Photograph - Digital Art
Description
We think of lighthouses as tall structures but Jeffrey's Hook Lighthouse is totally dwarfed by the George Washington Bridge! I debated about trying to visit this lighthouse, not relishing the idea of driving in NYC. In the end I decided to try. Even though there is apparently a park around the lighthouse, this was as close as I managed to get to it. The GPS directions I had told me "you have arrived at your destination" when I was approximately at the same point the big truck is on the bridge! So suddenly I was abandoned by my GPS right when I needed it most! I couldn't reset the GPS in the moving car with all the traffic whizzing by so I had to depend on my memory of studying the paper map the night before. I drove to the south along the Henry Hudson, missed the entrance to the only parking lot I could find, then had to drive back to the north a few miles, do a U-turn and try again. All under the watchful eyes of impatient NY drivers. I never found any auto access to the park that would get me close to the lighthouse so I parked far to the south and started walking. The closer I got, the sketchier some of the park inhabitants seemed so in the end I just took some photos from afar. Jeffrey's Hook Lighthouse gained fame as the Little Red Lighthouse, made famous by the 1942 children's book The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge by Hildegarde Swift. The lighthouse stands on Jeffrey�s Hook, a small point of land that supports the base of the eastern pier of the bridge on the Manhattan side of the Hudson River. It was constructed at its current location in 1921 by the United States Coast Guard as part of a project to improve Hudson River navigational aids. When the George Washington Bridge was completed in 1931, however, the lighthouse was considered to be obsolete, and the Coast Guard decommissioned it and put out its light in 1948, with the intention of auctioning it off. The proposed dismantling of the lighthouse resulted in a public outcry, largely from children who were fans of the book. This lead to the Coast Guarding deeding the lighthouse to NYC in 1951. The lighthouse was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979, and was designated a New York City Landmark in 1991. In 2002, it was relighted by the city.
FEATURED PHOTO, Pleasing The Eye group, 12/29/14
FEATURED PHOTO, The World We See group, 12/29/14
FEATURED PHOTO, Lighthouses group, 12/29/14
FEATURED PHOTO, The Road To Self Promotion group, 12/29/14
Uploaded
December 29th, 2014
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Viewed 6,108 Times - Last Visitor from New York, NY on 03/26/2024 at 7:46 PM
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Comments (54)
Paul Quinn
Great dichotomy of tall and MUCH taller. And, great story. I think we have all been duped by a GPS at one time or another.