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| The Rear Range Light. 10/9/25 dwm |
This is the last of the lights we saw on our Lake Erie trip.
The first three lights were in Erie, Pennsylvania, then heading east to west we stopped at all of them except for five.
There were three off-shore near downtown Cleveland, the Cleveland East Entrance Lighthouse (a metal cylinder), the Main Entrance Lighthouse to Cleveland Harbor and the East Breakwater Light in the same harbor.
The other two were blocked by Cedar Point Amusement Park, the Sandusky Breakwater light (another metal cylinder) and the Cedar Point Lighthouse which is on the grounds of the park. There were another four I'm not counting because they were too far off-shore.
The last pair of lights were on land, less than 10-feet from North Summit Street in Toledo on the grounds of H. Hansen Industries.
If you recall last week's post on the Toledo Harbor Lighthouse, it directed ships down a channel into Toledo, but it wasn't enough. Going back to the War of 1812, creating aids to navigation were discussed for the waterway for one hundred years.
Today's featured lights were proposed improvements over existing lights in 1913 that couldn't be seen because they were too short, obscured by smoke, or blocked by other ships. The last pair of Manhattan Range Lights would be 41-feet for the front range light and 83-feet for the rear.
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| The Front Range Light. 10/9/25 dwm |
The Manhattan Range Lights are still in use, but their old towers were retired in the 1980s when Hansen Industries offered to buy the metal towers. Instead, the Coast Guard gave the lights to the company. While cutting the frame to move the lights, each was cut down to 20-feet and moved to Hansen Industries.
The front light moved around a bit, it's first assignment was to attract attention for the Lighthouse Cafe on Broadway, which later became the Lighthouse Banquet Hall. In 2015, the Toledo Zoo bought it with a plan to use the restaurant building for zoo administration.
The front light was returned to H. Hansen Industries in 2023 and both were standing inside the fenced grounds of Hansen. I appreciate that the good people there thought to have the front light closer to the harbor entrance than the rear light.
Our mission complete, we added fourteen lights to our collection of Great Lakes Lighthouses. There are seven lights on Lake Erie in New York State, four of them in or outside Buffalo. At this date, we don't know when, or if, we'll get there.
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| The Manhattan Rear Range Light. 10/9/2025 dwm |
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