Long Beach Bar Lighthouse

When Congress shelled out $17,000 to build Long Beach Bar Lighthouse in 1871, they got more than a navigational aid, they got a giant water bug. Perched on spindly screwpiles that made it look like a long-legged insect skittering across Gardiners Bay, the lighthouse earned its nickname immediately. A local group had already bought the lighthouse itself at auction in 1955 for $1,710, roughly eight times the next-highest bid, only to watch arsonists torch it on July 4th, 1963. The community raised $140,000 to rebuild it, launching the replica down a shipyard railway in 1990 with a Navy band and 21-gun salute.

The lighthouse spent its working life being slowly outpaced by the very sandbar it was built to warn people about. By 1948 the shifting sand at Long Beach had crept so far past the light that it stopped being useful as a channel marker, and the Coast Guard simply decommissioned it. The Orient Point Marine Historical Association bought the abandoned structure a few years later for the price of a decent used car, presumably assuming the hard part was over. It wasn’t. The fire in 1963 took fifteen years to arrive but only one night to finish the job, leaving nothing behind but a concrete foundation and a name that had already outlived the building it described.