Fire Island Lighthouse
— — a black-and-white tower the Atlantic keeps walking away from.
Not only on a wall.
“A 168-foot tower of brick and black-and-white bands, finished in 1858, marking the western end of Fire Island. For nineteenth-century immigrants arriving by ship, this was the first piece of America they saw. The barrier island keeps shifting west under it, so the lighthouse that once stood at the inlet now sits four miles inland of it. The boardwalk in from Robert Moses State Park crosses dune and bayberry; the climb is 182 steps. from the studio
Fire Island Lighthouse, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Fire Island Lighthouse stands near the western end of Fire Island, a barrier island that runs roughly thirty-two miles along the south shore of Long Island in Suffolk County. The current tower, completed in 1858, replaced an earlier 1826 lighthouse that proved too short. It rises 168 feet above sea level and is built of brick painted in alternating black and white bands. Today the lighthouse is part of Fire Island National Seashore, administered by the National Park Service, with the access boardwalk beginning at Robert Moses State Park parking field five.
The tower is brick, originally yellow Connecticut sandstone-trimmed and unpainted, then painted in 1891 in the wide black-and-white bands that became its signature daymark. The keeper's dwelling beside it is a two-story brick house of the same period. Inside, a cast-iron spiral staircase of 182 steps reaches the lantern room, which once held a first-order Fresnel lens; that original lens is now displayed in a separate building on the grounds. The Fire Island Lighthouse Preservation Society took over the structure in 1982 and reactivated the light in 1986.
Access is by foot. Visitors park at Robert Moses State Park field five and walk roughly three-quarters of a mile east on a boardwalk through bayberry, pitch pine, and dune grass. The lighthouse grounds and keeper's quarters are open daily in summer and on a reduced schedule the rest of the year; tower climbs are ticketed and seasonal. The site is operated jointly with Fire Island National Seashore, the only federally designated seashore in New York State, established by Congress in 1964.