Buffalo Lighthouses

In the last post I mentioned that we saw three lighthouses one fall day last year.  I already shared the first two with you and now I will share the third one.  But wait, doesn't this post say Buffalo "lighthouses"?  I will get to that later.

Our drive from Grand Island to Buffalo to find the Buffalo Main Lighthouse wasn't the easiest, we ended up going in the wrong direction at one point, but we managed to find it eventually.  The lighthouse is located on Coast Guard property and when we went to visit the lighthouse we needed to be escorted to it.  That will be changing soon though because there is currently work being done that will allow the lighthouse to be visited without a Coast Guard escort for the first time since September 11, 2001.  This article contains more information. 

The Buffalo Main Lighthouse was completed in 1833 and remained active until 1914.  As is common with many deactivated lighthouses, it was scheduled to be demolished in the 1960's but a group of protesters saved this historic lighthouse.

One condition of being able to visit the lighthouse and take photos of it was that we were only able to take photos of it looking at the water.  We weren't allowed to take any photos of it looking at the Coast Guard base.  One of the beginning phases of making the lighthouse accessible to the public again is that it will be accessible by water taxi.  It would be nice to see the lighthouse from the water and capture some different perspectives of this structure.

One side note about our Coast Guard escort, he was from Maine!  It was nice to have something in common with the complete stranger walking with us to see the lighthouse.

Now, the lighthouse is deactivated and I have vaguely mentioned something about other lighthouses in this post and the previous post.  Do you remember the first photograph of the Buffalo Main Lighthouse?  It actually has a sneak peek of another lighthouse in Buffalo.  Let's take a look at that photo again. 

See that white bottle-shaped thing (with the nicely added arrow pointing to it)?  It is actually another lighthouse.  Including this one, there are three lighthouses in the immediate vicinity of the Buffalo Main Lighthouse.  The first one is the Buffalo North Breakwater Lighthouse.

Here are the other two lighthouses.

They are the Buffalo Intake Crib Lighthouse and the Buffalo Harbor Lighthouse, respectively.  These three aren't as aesthetically pleasing, but they are lighthouses so they needed to be mentioned! 

So there you have it, those are some of the Buffalo lighthouses.  There are two other lighthouses that have "Buffalo" in their name, one we have seen and one we haven't seen yet.

The next post will be the final post about lighthouses that we saw in the fall.

EDIT: Your lovely author of this post has overlooked one final lighthouse of Buffalo Harbor that we saw on this trip. That lighthouse is the Horseshoe Reef Lighthouse, and here it is.

I know, I know, it doesn't look like much (like the other ones out in the middle of the harbor here), even when you follow the LighthouseFriend's link to get a closer look you can see all that's left is the stone foundation, iron framework, and lantern room. Due to its decrepit condition the Horseshoe Reef Lighthouse has been placed on a watch-list for threatened lighthouse receiving the worst possible score.