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For the second time in its 180-year history, the 1833 lighthouse in Buffalo Harbor, New York has lost its lens. The current generation of lighthouse keepers isn’t worried though – because the tower will get a new one.
A $120,000 lens project at Buffalo offers one way out of a dilemma facing lighthouse groups across the country. With the classical Fresnel lenses at the heart of historic lighthouses now increasingly showing the effects of age and exposure, the demands of good stewardship and the desire for historical authenticity are coming into conflict. The Buffalo Lighthouse Association has found one answer to that problem.
The 110-year-old fourth order lens that had been in the tower since 1987 has been removed, conserved, and placed in a protected museum display. But the lantern at the Buffalo Lighthouse won’t remain empty for long; the group has commissioned a new and more historically appropriate third-order lens that is scheduled to be installed in October.
“We were very concerned about the condition of our lens, and the need for conservation was becoming urgent,” said Mike Vogel, president of the Association. “The possibility of buying a new lens offered a very good alternative to leaving the lantern empty. It took some time to raise the money, but now we can both preserve the historic artifact and enhance the visitor experience at the lighthouse.”
Making the decision easier, Vogel said, was the fact that the fourth-order rotating lens that was removed had never served in the 1833 lighthouse, and was a size too small to be historically correct. Its replacement, being built by Dan Spinella of Artworks Florida, will be a replica mid-19th century fixed third-order fixed lens, the kind that was installed in the old stone lighthouse in 1857.
The new lens is expensive, Vogel said, but the cost is far less than the insurance value the Coast Guard requires for the smaller fourth-order lens.
The problem with historic lens isn’t the glass, bronze, and brass – it’s the bedding compound used to seat and seal the prisms.
That compound is litharge, a mixture of linseed oil, white lead, and calcium carbonate. Lensmakers used small hardwood wedges, generally walnut or mahogany, to precisely aim the prisms, and then covered them and sealed the joint between glass and frame with litharge.
Over time, thanks to exposure to temperature fluctuations, sunlight, vibrations and other factors, the litharge can crack and crumble, exposing the wood and allowing it to begin to rot. When that happens, prisms are at risk. “Litharge has a lifespan,” said veteran lampist James Woodward, who trained under a former U.S. Lighthouse Service lampist in his younger years. “Generally, it’s 80 to 120 years.” “It’s like your window putty,” added James Dunlap, another lampist who joined Woodward on the Buffalo project. “You don’t expect it to last forever.”
Planning for the project, Vogel said, began back in 2003, when the Buffalo Lighthouse Association hosted a national lens conservation workshop in partnership with the National Park Service’s Historic Preservation Training Center and the American Lighthouse Council, then called the American Lighthouse Coordinating Committee.
That workshop drew 40 participants from not-for-profit groups and government agencies, and included a full condition assessment of both the fourth-order Barbier, Benard & Turenne lens in the harbor lighthouse and a larger third-order Chance Brothers lens – one that actually had been used in the tower from 1905 to 1914 – in the Buffalo History Museum. Woodward, who did the assessments, also stabilized that museum lens, which already had seen litharge failures.
Last year, the Association secured local grants from The Margaret L. Wendt Foundation and the East Hill Foundation to conserve and replace the smaller lens, which had been used in the South Buffalo Lighthouse from 1903 until 1967. The project also included creation of a smaller sixth-order prototype and teaching lens, which has a complete framework but only two prism panels – one demonstrating a fixed lens and the other a flashing one. The small and portable lens already has been used for volunteer training and festival and open house display.
On August 19, Woodward, Dunlap and a crew of riggers from the locally-based International Chimney Corp., movers of the Cape Hatteras and other lighthouses, removed the fourth-order lens from the 1833 tower and took it to the Heritage Discovery Center museum at 100 Lee St., Buffalo. Over the next five days, the team of lampists painstakingly cleaned the glass and metalwork, restored parts of the lamp pedestal to working order and repaired and resealed all the litharge joints.
The lens itself is a complex bivalve, or “clamshell,” design that was used only four times by the U.S. Lighthouse Service. Half the lens is a large bulls-eye panel just over 41 inches in diameter, and the other half has two smaller flash panels and a sector of reflector prisms that doubles as a lamp access door. Hinged brass panels inside the lens limit internal reflections because half the light was colored red by a tinted glass column.
The light marking the southern entrance to the harbor had a group-flashing red and white characteristic, with two white flashes and one red. Because red coloring absorbs 75 percent of the available light, a much larger bulls-eye was needed to make the flashes of equal intensity.
Originally lit with an oil lamp, the lens developed 1,800 candlepower. A 100-watt light bulb was installed in 1917, however, boosting the output to 150,000 candlepower.
The South Buffalo Lighthouse guided lake vessels into the docks of the steel mills and ironworks of Buffalo and Lackawanna, but was more important historically as a Great Lakes fog signal testing station and pioneering radio and radio-beacon site. The Buffalo Lighthouse Association has taken ownership of the station under the National Historic Lighthouse Preservation Act, and plans an $850,000 restoration to complement its nearly $1,000,000 worth of work on the nearly-complete 1833 lighthouse restoration at the north end of the harbor. Together, the projects will provide lighthouse “bookends” for development along the Lake Erie outer harbor portion of Buffalo’s dramatic waterfront renaissance.
At the end of the conservation effort, the lens was installed in a large museum display case at the Discovery Center, which also is located in the section of the city known as South Buffalo. Meanwhile, in Orlando, Spinella and custom fabricator Pavel Vacata are building a new third-order Fresnel to take its place in the now-empty lantern at the main downtown harbor entrance.
The prisms of the new lens will be made of optical acrylic, which already has a good multi-year track record in lighthouse lens applications. A fraction of the weight and cost of a glass lens, which no one is making now anyway, the lens would be capable of functioning as an aid to navigation, although the old stone tower no longer serves as a working lighthouse. Its prisms will be precisely tinted to replicate the aged crown or flint glass of old lenses, but will be cast, annealed, and polished using molds precisely designed by computer and created in a high-tech 3-D printer.
To Vogel, who created the National Fresnel Lens Inventory database in the 1990s, the lens not only re-fills the lantern but allows visitors a close-up look at a lens without exposing an authentic historic lens to finger-touches or other hazards. “That alone is a huge relief,” said the modern-day keeper who has spent countless hours supervising visitors to the top of the tower.
“I was happy to see the lens come out of the tower and into a safe, secure space,” added Woodward. “It’s out of a somewhat hostile environment, and the public can come visit and see it – especially those with disabilities.”
The classical lighthouse lens, a 19th century invention of French engineer Augustin Fresnel, was designed to focus the beams of a whale-oil lamp and project them miles out to sea. The technology has reversed now, with powerful light sources encased in simpler protective lens shells, and fewer and fewer Fresnel lenses remain in use. Coast Guard policy now favors removal from towers and conservation for display in secure temperature and light-controlled museum environments, retaining ownership while the responsibility to care for Coast Guard-licensed lenses increasingly shifts to historic preservation groups.
The 1833 tower in Buffalo replaced an 1818 tower that was one of the first two American-built lighthouses on the Great Lakes (erected under the same contract as one at Erie, Pennsylvania). It originally had a chandelier arrangement of nine lamps and reflectors, but gained a new fixed, or steady, Fresnel lens in 1857. That was replaced in turn, again without interrupting service, with a rotating and flashing lens in 1905. But the lighthouse went dark in 1914, and its lens was moved to a newer lighthouse on a harbor breakwater. When a freighter rammed that lighthouse in the late 1950s and caused enough damage to require demolition, a fourth aero-beacon-equipped lighthouse was built on a new outer breakwater and the old lens was moved to the museum.
The Buffalo Lighthouse Association began restoration work on the 1833 tower in 1985, and opened the structure for public tours during that process. It soon found a lens to fill the lantern – the lens that had been built in Paris for the Buffalo South Entrance Light, more commonly known as the South Buffalo Lighthouse. That lens had been removed and installed in the lobby of the administration building of the Coast Guard base on Buffalo’s Lighthouse Point – the home of the historic 1833 tower that marked the juncture of the Great Lakes and the Erie Canal.
The lens was installed in the older tower and relit briefly in 1987 to help launch the first of an annual series of U.S.-Canadian Friendship Festivals on the border. Thousands of boats filled the harbor for the event, and the lighting was timed to coincide with the climax of a Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra performance of The War of 1812 Overture in a park just across the water in Fort Erie, Ontario.
Visits to the tower and the lens proved popular in the years that followed, but were severely restricted due to base security needs after 9/11. In recent years, though, local Congressman Brian Higgins and then-Senator Hillary Clinton secured funds to let the Coast Guard put in new security fencing and designate part of the point as public parkland. The Lighthouse Association now holds a license for that land.
(All photographs courtesy of Mike Vogel of the Buffalo Lighthouse Association)
This story appeared in the
Nov/Dec 2013 edition of Lighthouse Digest Magazine. The print edition contains more stories than our internet edition, and each story generally contains more photographs - often many more - in the print edition. For subscription information about the print edition, click here.
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