Each year more than 100,000 tourists from far and near scale the 137 tower steps at Montauk Point Lighthouse -- the equivalent of a spiraling 10-story trudge.
The payoff is Long Island's million-dollar view.
To the north, the clear-day panorama embraces coastal Connecticut and Rhode Island; to the west, the windswept expanse of beach unfurling toward the Hamptons. Across open ocean to the south, a romantic optimist might conjure the Bahamas. And off to the east -- could that be Portugal?
Through wars and hurricanes, pelting sleet and clam-bisque fog, the tower has alerted ships to the shoals off Montauk Point ever since the original lantern was lit in 1797 (four months after the building was completed, because the ship bringing whale oil to fuel the beacon ran aground nearby).
New York's first lighthouse (and America's fourth-oldest among those still active), it was automated in 1987 by the Coast Guard, which continues to maintain the light and fog signal. But it's now owned by the Montauk Historical Society and open to the public as a museum.
Among the treasures displayed there is President George Washington's decree commissioning the lighthouse in 1792 -- not coincidentally the same year the New York Stock Exchange was established. After all, how could Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton turn his adopted city into a world financial center if every merchant ship met the same fate as the wrecked whale-oil carrier? Even the arduous job of lighthouse keeper (which until 1961, when electricity finally came, included hand-cranking the lamp mechanism every three hours) was considered so vital that it, too, was bestowed by presidential appointment.
Exhibits depict their lonely work and document changes to the lighthouse over the decades. For example, the original 80-foot tower has grown to 94.5 feet to accommodate larger lenses. And about 1900 a brown band was added midway around the white cone; distinctive paint jobs, called "day marks," evolved to give ships a quick sight aid in distinguishing lighthouses from one another. No two lighthouses have the same flashing pattern, either (Montauk's is every five seconds).
Old photos capture the period in 1898, at the end of the Spanish-American War, when Theodore Roosevelt and his more than 23,000 Rough Riders were quarantined at Montauk's temporary tent village called Camp Wikoff (Roosevelt signed the lighthouse guestbook while billeted at nearby Third House but didn't note whether he'd climbed the tower).
The lighthouse's own battle has been against erosion, which in 200 years has nibbled almost 250 feet off its Turtle Hill promontory -- bringing the bluff's edge to within 50 feet. But the bank has been stabilized for more than a decade thanks to Giorgina Reid, who succeeded where the Army Corps of Engineers had failed. Her solution: Terrace the bank with vegetation, which had done the trick at her North Shore summer home. For close to 20 years, starting on Earth Day in 1970, she drove to Montauk every weekend to direct the project (which after a few hearty laughs the Coast Guard approved). The museum's "Erosion Room" is dedicated to Reid, who died this month. Her patented method is chronicled in a book wryly titled "How to Hold Up a Bank."
On the lighthouse grounds are memorials to Long Island commercial fishermen lost at sea and to the determined souls aboard the slave ship Amistad, who landed it at Montauk's Culloden Point in 1839 in a bid for freedom -- which they won two years later after former President John Quincy Adams argued their case before the Supreme Court. There are occasional special events (Lighthouse Weekend is Aug. 18-19). And the coin-operated telescopes might help you clarify which Bahamas island you thought you saw from the tower's watch deck.
