History
This lighthouse, owned and operated by the United States Coast Guard, is an active aid to navigation. The steel tower has a square Balcony and "round cast iron lantern room features helical astragals" in the lantern. The two-story steel lighthouse keeper's quarters are in the art deco style. The structure rests on a 60 feet (18 m) by 54 feet (16 m) concrete pier, which rises more than 20 feet (6.1 m) above the lake's surface. The tower rests 14 feet (4.3 m) above the second floor and is 53 feet (16 m) tall overall. The red light has a focal plane of 67 feet (20 m) feet above Lake Michigan. The lantern and parapet are painted black.
The structure is near the middle of the four-mile-long Milwaukee breakwater. It is built to withstand heavy weather and waves when Lake Michigan becomes roughest. The building is made of quarter-inch "steel plates over a steel skeletal frame, and is equipped with windows and portholes with glass a full half inch in thickness." The structure was originally painted red, but became white thereafter.
In 1926, the original fourth order Fresnel lens was transferred from the Milwaukee Pierhead Light. The "helical barred lantern is also thought to have come from the pierhead light". The lens was removed in 1994, and is now an exhibit in Manitowoc at the Wisconsin Maritime Museum.
The resident lighthouse keepers serviced not only this light, but all of the lights in the harbor, however boat launching and landing from this structure was especially risky. A list of keepers is available.
The light is not listed on the National Register of Historic Places or the state list.
In June 2011 the United States Coast Guard declared that they no longer need the lighthouse, and that they will transfer it to eligible organizations, or if none are found, auction it.
Read more about this topic: Milwaukee Breakwater Light
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The steps toward the emancipation of women are first intellectual, then industrial, lastly legal and political. Great strides in the first two of these stages already have been made of millions of women who do not yet perceive that it is surely carrying them towards the last.”
—Ellen Battelle Dietrick, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)