HUDSON (AP) – The race is on to save a 150-year-old lighthouse from crumbling into the Hudson River in the United States (US).
Wooden pilings beneath Hudson-Athens Lighthouse are deteriorating, and the structure, built in the middle of the river when steamboats still plied the water, is beginning to shift. Cracks are apparent on the brick building and its granite foundation.
While there are other endangered lighthouses around the nation, the peril to this one 161 kilometres north of New York City is so dire the National Trust for Historic Preservation placed Hudson-Athens on its 2024 list of the country’s 11 most endangered historic places. Advocates said that if action isn’t taken soon, yet another historic lighthouse could potentially be lost in the coming years.
“All four corners will begin to come down, and then you’ll have a pile of rock in the middle. And ultimately it will topple into the river,” Van Calhoun of the Hudson-Athens Lighthouse Preservation Society said during a recent visit.
The society is trying to quickly raise money to place a submerged steel curtain around the lighthouse, an ambitious preservation project that could cost up to USD10 million. Their goal is to save a prominent symbol of the river’s centuries-long history as a busy waterway.
While the Hudson River was once home to more than a dozen lighthouses, only seven still stand.
Elsewhere, there’s a similar story of lost history.
Across the US, there were around 1,500 lighthouses at the beginning of the 20th Century. Only about 800 of them remain, said US Lighthouse Society executive director Jeff Gales. He said many of the structures deteriorated after they were automated, a process that became more common by the 1940s.
“Lighthouses were built to have human beings taking care of them,” Gales said. “And when you seal them up and take the human factor out, that’s when they really start falling into disrepair.”
The Hudson-Athens Lighthouse began operating in 1874 offshore from the city of Hudson, and was eventually co-named for the village of Athens on the other side of the river.
It was built to help keep boats from running aground on nearby mud flats, which were submerged at high tide.
“There were shipwrecks because they couldn’t see the sandbar. And so that’s why this lighthouse was put in the middle of the river, unlike most that are on the shoreline,” said preservation society president Kristin Gamble.
The lighthouse is still in use, though now with an automated LED beacon. The preservation society owns the building and maintains it as a museum.
The last full-time keeper, Emil Brunner, retired in 1949 when the lighthouse became automated. He lived there with his family for much of his tenure. One of his daughters recalled rowing to school and, in the winter, walking across the ice on a safe path marked by her father’s tobacco juice stains on the frozen surface.
Brunner also is portrayed on a 1946 Saturday Evening Post cover painting rowing with a child, Christmas presents and a tree in tow, as his wife and other children await their arrival on the lighthouse landing.
