Episode 40 - Grand Haven Lighthouses

0:00 Hi everyone. I'm Emily. And I'm Vince. And this is the Lighthouse Lowdown. . .

1:01 today so hope you are too. History Buoy is a historical event that actually happened just a couple weeks ago. Whoa. I know. Okay. It's gonna go down in history. I know it. It is about putting a Fresnel lens back into service which is I told you about it the other day when I saw it on Instagram. Here is the Instagram post for those of us who are watching on YouTube. It's by Montauk Point Lighthouse. MTK underscore lighthouse on Instagram. They posted a picture of their three and a half order Fresnel lens there by valve back in the lantern room of the lighthouse. The old owl's eye configuration. Very exciting owl's eye. Single owl's eye. That was on Monday November 6 at 6 p.m. on the dot. They brought the Fresnel lens back into life in Montauk Point Lighthouse.

1:58 Three and a half order. So why is this historical? Because it has been 36 years since this Fresnel lens was back in the lighthouse. And as far as I know it's not a thing for the Coast Guard to put a Fresnel lens back up in a lantern room when they have cheaper less expensive options to maintain that which originally there was an arrow beacon in this lantern room but it was so dull that Mia Sertik who's the executive director of the Montauk Historical Society who owns and maintains this lighthouse. She said that the main light, the beacon in this lighthouse was dimmer than just like the lights outside the lighthouse like lamps and stuff. Geez. Yeah.

2:45 This lens was manufactured specifically for Montauk Point Lighthouse hence the special size and shape which we talk about a lot in our episode devoted to the Montauk Point Lighthouse. They made this in 1902 and it was in service from 1903 until 1987 when the Coast Guard installed the arrow beacon. So the return of the Fresnel lens is part of a two-year pilot program to help the Coast Guard gather data about Fresnel lenses quote operation and condition in an environmentally controlled lantern room and this is from an article they published on Tuesday in the United States Coast Guard News. They also said quote this pilot program aims to quantify and document standards of care required to maintain operating Fresnel lenses and to establish appropriate plans of action for the remaining Fresnels operating across the Coast Guard. For the next two years the Coast Guard will partner with MHS to ensure proper care of the Fresnel lens and lantern room environmental data monitoring end quote. So basically they're doing this because there are still about 50 Fresnel lenses still in service and they want to see the best ways to care for a Fresnel lens in like a very controlled environment. So like if everything's in perfect condition like if we install these things how can we best care for Fresnel lenses so that they can remain in service without having to be replaced. And this is the Coast Guard's being trained or okay? Yeah exactly.

4:13 And the Coast Guard is maintaining the light at Montauk Point Lighthouse but only the light? Yes only the beacon and the rest of it's all the Montauk Historical Society. Nice is this one I can't remember on Montauk is it accessible this lantern room? Accessible? Yeah to public or is it probably not? I doubt you could go inside I think that was part of the part of the sadness of me finding this out is that you can't go and you know admire the handiwork of the Fresnel lens up close anymore it's no longer like a public thing because originally it was in the museum at Montauk Point where you could go and check it out. Yeah and is this a new lens that they installed or is this a refurbished one they had they're really this is the one that was in the museum yeah they just took out of the museum isn't that so cool? That's so cool. I know 36 years it was down there and then they were just like let's clean it up so they had to do a lot of work to prep the Fresnel lens for going back in a service but because right now there's only five Coast Guard lampists that can care for Fresnel lenses. That is wild. Yeah so Mia Sercic said that the restoration and renovation of the lighthouse that we recently talked about served to prepare for this as the tower was weakened by water damage which would have made supporting this extremely heavy Fresnel lens pretty dangerous in the lighthouse so she said that they weren't um what's the word like approved yet to be part of this project but they still kept it in mind as they were renovating the lighthouse

5:46 just in case it was approved and they could go ahead with it. Right keep it as an option. So they had to prepare the lantern room for the optimum conditions for the lens such as UV light filtering window film a new ventilation system and state-of-the-art temperature humidity and dewpoint monitors and they also had to they had to like refurbish the lens as well they had to give it a new pedestal and all the mercury had to be removed from its base because originally it was on a mercury float system. Yeah. And I think that may have been true for when it was in the museum they had it in a mercury float system so you could watch what was happening up close but I also feel like that would be such a safety hazard that maybe I don't know. I think mercury is safe as long as you don't physically contact it. Yeah. Or ingest it. I just wouldn't trust the public to not try to touch it.

6:38 But maybe it was closed off in some way I don't know I just oh my god they said that they had to actively go and remove like make sure that all the mercury was removed so remediation. Yeah so maybe that's either from when it was used you know almost four decades ago or maybe it was hey we just took it out of this float system we're gonna have to clean it out. I would like to learn more about that because I think that you know like mercury as a liquid bed I'd like to see how that worked but also today we have like like Delrin. Are you familiar with Delrin? No. So Delrin is a I'm pretty sure it's a product of Dow Chemical so they make a lot of cool stuff or like 3M one of those companies chemical companies that makes a bunch of different products but Delrin is a plastic that I didn't learn about until I worked on my senior design project but it's like a super slick plastic. Oh. It's used in like assembly lines and high use areas like where you're producing something you have a contact where you need to contact a product or something where it's it's plastic but it's like a lubricated surface permanently. Very slippery. Yeah just do I think it's a polymer technically so due to the due to the properties of the material itself lubricates yeah without a film without oil without graphite you know the other types of lubrication so. That's interesting. I'm surprised there's not been some type of I'm sure there is some type of joint or bushing or a bearing I guess is the word I'm looking for. That's not mercury based I'm sure

8:12 there are but I don't know what that technology is today. Does it have a high like can it handle lots of weight on it or. I think there are there's definitely limits to each application. Yeah maybe that's what's holding them back because I know these are very very heavy tons. But this is well this is probably the most modern beacon in the United States then. I mean if they're talking about ventilation systems moisture control the glass conditioning I mean that's it's literally probably the newest one. Yeah. It's interesting. They had to restore the lens and have it cleaned by Jim Woodward and a new pedestal and gear mechanism was built by Kurt Fosberg both from the five qualified lampists that I mentioned earlier. Talk to them. Yeah. We heard about Kurt Fosberg a while ago from Carl Lindquist and Fred Stonehouse. They mentioned that that's someone that we should probably talk to and Kurt was also was a cult. He was a technical director or something to do with Fresnel lenses in the movie The Lighthouse with Robert. Oh that's right. He was the advisor.

9:20 I don't know the title. I know I can't remember what it was but we found him on the scrolling list of names at the end of the credits. Do we talk to him. I can't remember. We haven't. No. We'll need to reach out. We need to check in with all of our contacts. I know. Quite a community we need to keep up with. That would be a cool episode talking about how he what he does as his job as a lampist for the Coast Guard. That would be awesome. But anyway so after the program Mia Sertic and the people of Montauk are hoping the lens will stay there for good. But for now it's just kind of a two year plan and after that they don't really know what's going to happen. But hoping it'll get to remain up there forever. So it's a kind of a temporary training program. Yes. With the possibility of extending. That's cool. I think it's interesting they can't or in this at least in this instance the arrow beacon wasn't as bright as they needed. Yeah. Especially given sound. I'm guessing now but other LED technology the lights you know streetlights and area lights around the tower were even more impressive than it is crazy. You can't you like you cannot replicate the power of a Fresnel lens like you either have to be OK with taking the cut to the light. You know you're you're what's it called. Your beacon is light. Oh the intensity. Yeah light intensity luminosity.

10:36 Making words up now. Well I'm working on a project luminous intensity. I think that's actually what it is. Yeah luminosity. Sounds like the Illuminati. But you either have to take that with your you know your lower amount of maintenance or you just have to have a Fresnel lens. There's no better way. Yeah. I'm working on a project. I won't say where it's at but it's a medical health care facility. And I'm helping to design the plumbing HVAC parts of it. So you know but there are boilers in this very large building and the boilers have a stack. So the stack is effectively a tower. The tower goes up 170 roughly 170 feet in the air maybe 200 feet. And we've talked about the team has talked about how do you add a light to the top of the tower because you need some way for you know medical helicopters or other aircraft. Be aware. I think it's an FAA regulation and there's other people looking into it that are not not me not my scope of work. But it makes me smile. It's like oh you have a big tower. You want to put a light on top. I've got an idea. Suggestive Fresnel. Yeah.

11:48 It's not the cheapest. Yeah. Well it requires a lot of maintenance. And then they also this conversation also went in. I didn't chime in. I should have just for chuckles. But well we have to have we have to have access for someone to be able to change a light bulb if we put an electronic light up there. It's like yep you sure do. You would need like a stair tower. Yeah. You should do like a winding staircase. So it made me smile. But there's lots of it's funny that it's still a a challenge even though. Yeah. Right. Totally different than the lighthouse. Yeah. Still relevant. But yeah that was my history boy. I think that this is like a very big step but like an important thing in lighthouse history that we're putting Fresnel lenses back into service man. Yeah. It could be big news if I mean the one is big news but it could be big news if this is continued over the next couple of years. Yeah. I'm sure it won't be a big wave of new lenses because this is just for like a pilot program but very cool. So you talk to me once on an episode about the production of Fresnel lenses mostly in France. I we didn't post that episode. So I'll have to redo that history so that people can actually. I thought it was really interesting. Yeah. It was a long one.

13:00 It was a long history but I think that's a good one I need to bring back. I think it was so long and so labor intensive that I think it should be its own standalone. Yeah. Well it's yeah they're very interesting to me. It's not a common piece of technology and it's the history that I remember is a lot of technology changes over time. I've come into the same product. Yeah. And also you know the demand obviously has changed. So that's probably changed industry too. Yeah that's true. So to get a new or to restore Fresnel lens these lampists that sounds really unique as well as shipping that thing. Oh my gosh. Can you imagine the bubble wrap. Oh so much bubble wrap. So much foam styrofoam.

13:49 So yeah. Well cool. Good good history. Everyone go check out MTK underscore lighthouse on Instagram and you can see the Fresnel lens for yourself back in the Lantern Room. They have an excellent photo of it. I think it looks like in the morning or something and it's rainbow. All the all the prisms are lit up. It's gorgeous. Really nice. Very cool. So we're going to move on to our lighthouse of the day and actually it's Lighthouses. Oh. A special episode. All right. Of multiple lighthouses. It's still in service not like they kept having to. Yeah not one after another. Yeah they didn't have to keep having. They did. There is a lot of action going on in this episode when it comes to lighthouses. So we're going to Grand Haven Michigan on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. Okay. And it's known for its sandy beaches and beautiful lighthouses. The city was founded in 1834 and was named Grand Haven in recognition of its safe and spacious harbor which I thought was cute. Let's name it a haven. A grand one.

14:54 Yeah a grand haven. Only a couple of years later a lighthouse was suggested for a couple of reasons. One being the river was the largest by far that emptied into Lake Michigan. So it's going to be a hubbub and it was the only place on the east shore that large vessels could shelter from bad weather. So they needed it to be well represented with lighthouses. I'm surprised they didn't call it Great Haven. Well we were talking about the 1800s. Great wasn't. Do they call them the Great Lakes? Or they're the Grand Lakes at the time. Think about it. You got me there. Maybe because it was the Great Lakes they didn't want to name it Great Haven. They wanted to be special. Grand Haven. Grand is better than great. Great Grand Wonderful. That's what they say. Who says that? It's a line from Billy Madison. Oh.

15:46 I was like what? So anyway the dwelling in the tower were made of stone from Green Bay while the stone steps were from Cleveland. I don't know why they specified the different types of stones. The stairs were fancy and the rest of it wasn't. I'm not sure. I don't know. It was lit in 1839. It's 30 feet tall with a fixed white light and was right there on the beach which is not the best idea. It's beautiful but technically not a good idea. Very scenic but you know not for very long. They built a timber wall to help try and protect the property from the waves which if you have to build a wall to protect something that you built there in the first place. Out of timber. Yeah then maybe you should have thought about that.

16:34 But in 1852 storm waves broke down this wall and pummeled the lighthouse and it was brought down the next day by all the water. So it took another two years before they started to work on making a replacement and this time they learned from their mistakes and built the lighthouse on a bluff above the old location which is just like a little cliff and they finished in 1855. I have a little photo. Oh cool. Wow. It's an old one. A lot of these pictures are actually from the US LHS. They're archives. I have a link to it was basically a huge word document that had a bunch of historical documents and then the next was like their plans for restoring these lighthouses that I'll talk about and all the phases of all the phases. This is a picture of the one that was on the bluff. They called it upper lighthouse which is going to be relevant. It was 24 feet tall. It was made of rubble stone and had a circular tower connected to a six room one and a half story dwelling. I think that maybe the half like nowadays if you have a half half level it's like what a half a half level on the other side of the building.

17:59 Well but that's just like an attic or something right like a like a half level it's like you have a loft or something. Okay that must have been what it was but six rooms. That's pretty good. In the lantern room they had a bullseye panel and this was cool a bullseye panel revolving around a fixed fourth order lens to produce a white flash every 90 seconds. So we've talked about it once before but I've never covered a lighthouse that actually had it standalone in the lighthouse room. But it's like a singular bullseye panel and then attached to it is a bunch of just like metal sheeting and it goes around the lantern so that everything is covered except for this one bullseye lens. There's no image we have of that. No it's unfortunate but no. It's too long ago. I'm shocked that they even had a photo. They took it in the 1880s which is like really early on in photos.

18:53 I was just gonna say I've got to be picky. How much effort went into taking this photo right? You know you like load up the little flash thing and set up your little tunnel and they took it with the trees blocking 90% of the landscape. They wanted to get the whole lighthouse in there. If they took okay they didn't do it from a boat I guess but that way yeah maybe they couldn't. I think this is probably the best they could do with their modern technology. Unmodern. Anyway people should go check out our YouTube and you can see this picture. It's not that bad. Taking it in the 1880s. Vince is really being picky. It was raised another four feet and got a new lantern room in 1868 and this lighthouse is just gonna kind of chill here for the next 40ish years.

19:43 So this is 1868. This is yeah. Because it's 1880s is the photo. New lantern room raised four feet. So this lighthouse we're gonna talk about it just barely anymore. The rest of this episode yeah is about the other lighthouses that are built. So in 1858 the Detroit and Milwaukee railroad established a ferry line to Grand Haven from Detroit and so they added a pier so that they could you know they added a pier. For the ferry. Yeah and they maintained their own light on it. It was small and it was discontinued pretty soon after because the pier was so long that they didn't really know like the pier was so far out there that they couldn't maintain the light.

20:29 You have to have someone walk out on the pier and as you know Lake Michigan. Pretty wild. Yeah so it was very difficult to go out there and maintain it so they eventually discontinued it. This is where I started to really struggle with keeping track of all of these lighthouses and like all these faces and I skipped a couple of things that were just too confusing for me to figure out. Everybody okay this is like that game where you hide something under a cup and you Michelle game. Mix them all around and trying to guess like it's like there's a light but all of a sudden now there isn't a light but now there's three lights and you switch two of them around and one was white and now it's red like it's almost like you got gas lit all of what I'm just saying that researching these lighthouses was very very difficult and if I'm not totally correct someone who knows should let me know but like our well our trusted resources US LHS the website for this lighthouse and lighthouse friends all had information that was different from each other. Oh contradicting. Yes or like the lighthouse friends had it had one paragraph that was very confusing I just ignored it eventually because I was like I can't find anything that substantiates this information and it doesn't make sense to me so I just anyway.

21:55 So let's put a big asterisk this is I think that's how do you pronounce it asterisk asterisk the asterisk is that right asterisk asterisk we'll put a big one of those and say this is your best interpretation. Yes this is my interpretation of the history of the Grand Haven Lighthouses. Gotcha. So in 1870 the lighthouse board requested eight thousand dollars for a new wooden tower 1200 feet of elevated walkway on this existing pier and a bell. So this was their solution to not being able to access the lighthouse as they put an elevated walkway on top of the pier so that when waves are crashing down below and I'll show a picture of this at the end they would still be able to just walk above the waves and go to light so it was originally made of wood eventually they changed it to iron I think. Sounds so sketchy. I know like you better make sure and they had a ton of this elevated walkway had lakes every like couple of feet so if something was damaged there was no way it was all going to be taken out at the same time.

22:59 Yeah but it's attached to the pier right? Yeah but the pier is made of stone it wasn't like oh okay yeah it was like um it went down to the to the the bottom of the yeah the bottom of the lake. I sorry I've got it uh asterisk asterisk that was a weird voice I don't like that. A couple years later well here let me show a photo. Oh cool. So here is their original boat. Yeah super cool boat but this was their original lights just like a little lamp has some legs on it and you can see in this picture the elevated walkway coming off the top. That is terrifying. What? Imagine the the pier is just engulfed in flames and there's rolling coffee's getting a little strong engulfed in water yeah and the waves are just rolling over it and you got to go tend to the light you're just walking like that would be a little sketchy for the waves and there's nothing keeping like water spray you'd be soaking wet by the time you got over there but you'd have an awesome trench coat oh yeah they probably have like all their galoshes and stuff in 18 okay so that was in 1870 a couple years later they built a fog signal building which was installed directly behind this pier headlight wow so look at those horns so cool yeah so that's it's a pretty big fog house going on there i think they took a lot of effort to make steam at those days yeah and they had to make sure that was really sturdy because if they had to build a walkway which you could walk above the waves well you got to build that thing so that waves can hit it

24:31 without destroying it wow in like during the 1880s this pier was lengthened like every couple of years which ended up moving the light in the fog house like further and further out into the lake and in december 1886 there was this huge storm that forced the light back 12 feet and crunched like crushed this walkway behind it and damaged the fog house a little bit so the building the pier floats is they extended it out and you're saying these buildings moved out but it could have detached from the pier and like damaged the walkway or something i don't know why would they have a pier why would it float i thought here's a definition of a pier like a structural pier is that it's a column that goes down to bedrock so i always thought like a water pier is defined as a pier because it has legs that go down to the bottom of them so piers are fixed piling supported structures oh piling is what i'm thinking of didn't float the component the vertical components yes so the pier is on piles so they move these buildings okay sorry i got i got hooked on that yeah so yeah so you'd have to be moved them several times yeah and then there was some damage from a big storm but both survived they just had to do a lot of maintenance and reconstructing after that 1892 we're going back to the bluff lighthouse the 1855 bluff lighthouse gained a second rotating bullseye which changed the flash pattern to every 60 seconds instead of 90 seconds so they probably slowed the rotation a little bit yeah slowed their roll and added

26:08 another bullseye lens and so if you could maybe you don't know this so at that point you have on the bluff every 60 seconds white flash what was this light signature on the end of the pier fixed white okay so you'd want to go to the fixed white yeah and the double flash is you know where the earth was yeah where you would find land in 1894 an elevated conduit was added so the light on the pier could be controlled from the bluff lighthouse so you wouldn't have to walk all the way out here to turn on the light yeah which 1894 electronic yeah okay i mean okay i have to review my history of i know i always think that sounds really early technology okay no no it's believable 18 1876 was when they invented a generator so you could produce a steady current of electricity okay so 20 years later yeah checks out yeah it isn't until i'm speaking on the on the podcast that i sometimes question the things that i've written down i'm like that's what they said 20 years ago we had the motorola laser now we've got iphone 15 with titanium is this an ad i wish in 1904 so this there was some information in between this 19 sorry 1894 and 1904 that i skipped over because it was very confusing didn't seem quite correct so in 1904 a 52 foot cast iron cylindrical tower was built on a concrete foundation

27:42 on the outer edge of the pier which then took the fresnel lens from the bluff lighthouse rendering it discontinued so we ditch the bluff lighthouse for a cylindrical tower so now we have two lights on the pier and none on land why because they wanted to do range lights which we talked about one of our previous episodes so these lighthouses when they when the lights line up on top of one another then you're you know you're heading in the correct direction to enter the pier or enter the harbor cool yeah in 1910 the tower portion of the bluff lighthouse was demolished and replaced with more housing which served as the keeper's house for these two lighthouses until the coast guard took over and it was sold in an auction in the 50s and i read it is now apartments it's like apartment cool yeah is the pier still there yes that's the lighthouses that still exist today awesome are these two lighthouses but sorry go ahead is the pier in service like is the detroit ferry still going oh i don't know i would think so probably there's still a ferry line on google maps heading into this harbor so i don't know if it's still the same one but in 1906 the new cylindrical tower was moved from the pier head to the inner light position and the foghorn building was moved to the pier head position so they just swapped places short ones in front of the tall one so now the short ones in front of the tall one which makes a lot more sense and this was only this was only a couple years after they built the cylindrical ones so they're probably like oh can you imagine getting the paperwork like you didn't think of

29:17 this like how can we possibly have a range light one of them's hidden behind the other one doing the same job five years later oh my gosh yeah the range light is like if the short light disappears but you still see the tall one yeah you might be in line it's pretty much pretty it's pretty good you might be lined up you're mostly at least going in the right direction cool look at that horn this was so when they moved the when they swapped the two towers they added a lantern room and a gallery to the lake facing end of the foghorn building so that smaller one is gone the smaller one that's in front and they turned the foghorn building into its own lighthouse making this an integral lighthouse i have never seen this type of layout before yeah isn't that fun an integral lighthouse with the foghorn which looks like an awesome trumpet yeah like a war horn and uh on a pier this is extremely unique it's pretty neat cool war one was about to kick off oh really i think so i didn't have any history on if anything happened to these i mean they're on the great lake so it's you won't have to turn them off for right facing out to sea or anything yeah i wonder how war affects inland lighthouses i think probably the same way after some status changes yeah some deathcon yeah i mean the civil war is different the civil war probably affected all of them true because it was all inland and coastal but this is very north so i doubt there's

30:50 really anything going on so this so this foghorn lighthouse that's now like our integral lighthouse became the grand haven south pierhead outer light and was given a sixth order for now lens fixed red very cool and the grand haven south pierhead inner light which is our tall cylindrical tower kept its fourth order lens with one white flash every 60 seconds so like i said these worked as range lights so if they were lined up then you were entering the harbor correctly and you'd want to go towards well the red one to start and then you'd line them up to make sure you're and there's some crazy curve to this pier um all i think i think it might be the next picture but uh there's this curve to the pier which shows how they had to maneuver things so that when you looked at the lights on top of each other it was the correct it wasn't like you can just put them anywhere and so interesting oh this is a picture there's a north pier which has a little light on it i don't mention it since the south was already so confusing i didn't look deep into they didn't really mention it because this little lighthouse on the end of the north pier isn't a part of this collection going on yeah i didn't mention it but this is a good picture of showing the north and south piers you can see all three lighthouses and you can see some people standing on it that's awesome it is public so you can walk up and down these piers that is a big ship as well yeah there's a

32:21 couple of pictures actually a lot of photos of big ships and like barges and stuff right next to that lighthouse at the end so i mean it's over a thousand feet out into the water so cool in 1917 the inner lighthouse so our tower our tower changed from white to red and the outer light changed from red to white so they're really keeping these yes captains on their toes i know so then they painted the buildings to match their lights so the outer one was white and the inner one was red cool and nowadays they're both red and both the lights are red so at some point i couldn't find exactly when the outer light changed to a red lantern and they also paint they painted it red and they're really bright too we're going crazy with red lighthouses lately if you look at our instagram it's just like red red red marquette the youtube cover on marquette i really like that one yeah yeah i'm just helping you out so that your youtube covers are nice that's what we're all about so nowadays uh the inner light is an occulting red for four seconds so you have a dark flash basically yeah in a red light every four seconds and the outer is a flash of red every 10 seconds it's pretty cool also this is unrelated but the us lhs has updated their website yeah i don't know how recent it was but i i opened it and when it was immediately like whoa it's updated and it's much easier to navigate now because originally i had a really hard time

33:57 every single time no matter how many times i did it i had a hard time finding um research material like they have their research material in a specific spot it's like the archives or the light lists or something you know and it was very difficult to navigate through the website to get to those because it's not like it wasn't just like a drop down where you click lightless or click research there was nothing like that so you had to do some serious digging into the website but now they have a drop down menu where you can just click on lightless just they just made research so much easier nice that's good yeah so i don't really know when that happened but something i noticed and they have a if you go to the lightless they have a simulation of each lighthouse flash pattern now so you can if you don't know what a colting red four seconds is then you can click on it and it'll show you exactly what it looks like us lhs is getting fancy i know look at them it's so much fun i really enjoyed looking through their new websites nice everyone should go check it out us lhs.org us lhs.org well cool all right 1922 a reinforced concrete structure was added underneath the outer light and it was shaped like the bow of a ship so it took the heat off the waves that would like hit the outer light from the front very very neat cool i have a picture i've never seen that on a on a pier look at it wow isn't that cool that's not what i was picturing i was picturing

35:27 like in the water oh yeah that's what i thought originally too but there's there's something must get pummeled it yeah anytime i mean if you look at it the water level when it's calm is just one feet below the pier so any sort of wave action is going to be hitting these lighthouses and i don't know when this when this photo was taken but the that concrete blocking has been beat yeah like a rag i know like and even the top part of this concrete structure is like crumbling the top part it's been impacted isn't that crazy wonder if it's some ice remember we talked about um was it standard rock yeah standard rock and the ice impacting the tower and the structure on that like it would form sheets and then these sheets would get pushed against the lighthouse and that's what like broke through the side of the lighthouse one year so sketchy that crazy so yeah it's for storm waves and also for like you said for ice sheets coming in and trying to beat up the lighthouse so so this new structure kind of breaks any force coming towards our cylindrical tower so it kind of dissipates that energy that otherwise probably would have also damaged the cylindrical so our outer light here has gotten a shield and got little porthole windows and yeah it's so cool i want to go inside so bad it's such a neat little lighthouse on the end there very special being awesome airbnb that's what i'm saying at the same time that they added this concrete structure they also replaced the wooden cat walk with a cast iron one so the one you've

37:00 seen this picture is also cast okay wow the um so this is the north pier we're looking at in the south pier oh so south pier north pier is further from us so it looks like they make a channel that goes into town that makes sense into the haven and originally when they they said that they wanted to have these lighthouses it was some some guy who suggested they do a lighthouse probably part of the lighthouse board but he said the only change you would need to make like like everything's set up perfectly but the only change you'd need is to straighten the harbor so they had to like chip away at the edges to make sure that it was a straight entry into the harbor so you can see how perfectly straight it is when you curve in so it's small small boats like we got a pontoon probably a speedboat out there they have really big ships coming in here i like the red but the same time they did this new catwalk they also covered the foghorn building in metal sheets and i don't really see it in this picture maybe they did it so well that it looks that's metal that's metal yeah how do you know um i by the way it is okay we should just move on it's no it's like uh it's like a barn building like a cleary barn like like tilt up or pull barns don't have metal all over new barns do oh really like cleary is a company they come and they build your barn it's prefabricated metal sheets you and your your companies i can't help it i think of kleenex as tissues you know type

38:31 of thing but like um that's hilarious uh like modern barns like a like a shop it's like a metal shop okay like it's like what you would see like a garage or an outbuilding at a new farm okay those are technically barns they don't really build barns anymore out of wood because it's not cost effective um it'd be a lot of maintaining which is unfortunate the wood ones are awesome yeah it's that's another subject so i to me this looks like a metal roof and matching metal um siding siding yeah yeah and and they put the they didn't redo it they just put the metal on top of the wood so it's just cladding yeah yeah so that all all of that happened in 1922 wow yeah that was a long time ago i'm sure they've done some maintenance since then but i think that concrete that concrete's from 1922 i bet you it's been redone they i don't know maybe not uh there has to be ongoing maintenance but concrete's pretty difficult they are raising money right now to do some restoration efforts so i'm sure that includes this concrete structure well and cast iron too i don't really know what else you would use but for that walkway to me iron is pretty corrosive yeah especially i mean it's not it's not technically salt water it's fresh water but still the water exposure it's a lot of metal they had to put down there probably like what's the cheapest we can do i bet you it has some thick paint on it yeah yeah but in 1988 they also added lights along the catwalk oh pretty

40:02 really nice photo of that and you can see both of the red lantern rooms going on that's very cool yeah and now we are all the way to 2012 the coast guard handed over the two lighthouses under the national historic lighthouse preservation act of 2000 to the city of grand haven so the grand haven lighthouse conservancy i think is how you pronounce it uh which is a community group was formed to care for the lights and they are actively raising money to restore these lighthouses love it so here's a picture of wow some when it's stormy that's the condition of the pier that they have to so this walk this all elevated walkway you can walk out when it's storming and not i mean you get wet but you wouldn't get washed out honestly it's pretty dangerous yeah i just looking at look at the water breaking on that concrete i know you can you can see it being split in half it's so cool it's so awesome the last picture with the lights i was going to say that's our cover photo yeah i was like this one's pretty cool too yeah this is a great photo so the inner tower there do you know is that clad with metal as well probably yeah it's made of cast iron so oh wow yeah it doesn't have any other dirty boy sturdy boy i think the outer foghorn building is that what it's still called what you would call it yeah um houses boilers to create steam or i guess compressors probably today compressed air but that's probably why they have the building there i saw in the

41:35 one of the really old photos there was two when they had two horns on top yeah they also had um two stacks it's like a full yeah for the boilers at the time yeah i think it's interesting you have utility just from an engineering perspective it's there at the horns at the outer light rather than because that's the whole building they have to maintain yeah rather than have you know them on land where right and now those chimneys are no longer useful so they just don't have them yeah just over time they probably have louvers for airflow that's it cool really cool it's a picture of kind of what winter looks like they had an article about winter on the gray and heaven lighthouses and yeah this is some precarious walking conditions and there's this guy all the way i don't want to ruin this for people but that looks a little like a risk to public safety i guess i'm a pansy definitely i mean you have to trust your boots you can't control people but i think i have another cool picture really pretty look at the front oh my gosh oh you can see that um harbor is doing its job that is really cool water flow like keeping calm water but that just makes ice pile up pretty easy i've never spent any time up there that looks cold as hell i know i can't imagine it i love that people are still like tons of people still out on this pier yeah even though you know the conditions are so cold i'm surprised the uh and maybe it is but i'm surprised that outer light is not heated for that purpose yeah so it doesn't for defrosting yeah cool that's the

43:08 grand haven lighthouses so grand haven um as you said it's on the east coast of lake michigan yes so across from there is is it west coast is chicago is that right i should know these things we are a lighthouse podcast by the way uh no chicago is still on the east side wait no way no no you're right chicago's west coast of lake michigan yeah so across roughly across north south oh we've got south haven there's also a this also happened there's a south haven pier head lighthouse a south haven south pier head lighthouse i'm like bro so there's a grand haven south pier head lights and south haven south i'm like so so what happened is the us lhs confused these lighthouses in a couple of their photos no way they put south haven south pier head lights in the grand haven section so that's part partially why i got so confused i'm like what the heck is this lighthouse that's so funny south haven south haven oh yeah it's a fair size city grand haven oh it's grand rapids is right there that's a big city so and then here we go chicago down here yeah milwaukee's huge grand rapids is big chicago's enormous of course yeah and then green bay is up here this is where they got their stone for the first lighthouse i don't know anything about green bay i don't either so they is there uh up by mackincaugh or mackinaw is there a crossover there i bet so

44:41 there's no way they wouldn't have made oh yeah that's a big bridge cool i bet you this island is really blocking lighthouse in there i bet so yep old mackinac point lighthouse there's mcgulpin point as well gulpin mcgulpin i'm mcgulpin me at mcdonald's oh old mackinac looks awesome four and a half stars 4.7 let's give it some credit here sorry mcgulpin's cute hanging up 4.7 as well let's go i'm going to be covering these next looks like churches they do cool anyway we'll learn more about it yeah but uh yeah good job thank you that was a cool one yeah and um we follow an artist on instagram who draws lighthouses digitally draws lighthouses very simple artwork um which artist is this i can't remember let me see you show me some of their work but yeah i think they only they may only do michigan lighthouses so let me see if i can find them it's at mitten state lights on instagram m i t t e n it's a michigan-based artist doing a lighthouse illustration project but they drew the grand haven state park you know lighthouses oh that's cool yeah it's a simple representation it's like um they also did i mean this is an insult i mean it as a good thing it's like postcard art yes yeah i think yeah that's definitely they got marquette harbor that's cool too yeah very cute everyone go check them out those would be fun fun prints yeah or backgrounds i really like those yeah grand haven lighthouses very cool look up pictures of them because they're

46:14 very picturesque very pretty lots of people seem to hang out around them too yep i want to say thanks to our like uh i would like to say thank you to our new followers on linkedin yeah we're trying to build our linkedin presence so we can reach out for professional development and kind of be in the circle here the lighthouse people yeah um so we've got a lot of people adding us lately on linkedin so thank you to them youtube's still growing um having fun with that yeah our podcast is growing as well got lots of new listens and we're very thankful for all of our new followers yep so thank you lots more fun things to come yep keep checking us out on instagram we'll be posting pictures from each of our episodes follow us on linkedin and youtube and anywhere you listen to your podcasts leave us a voicemail and yes if you liked this episode leave us a review you can do it on our website the lighthouse lowdown.com and you can also leave a review on spotify or apple wherever you listen to your your podcasts cool so we hope you enjoyed this and we'll catch you next time on the lighthouse lowdown.