Old Nantucket beacon seeks safe harbor

Historic lightship yours for a dollar

The Nantucket Lightship at Rowes Wharf in 2004. In its glory days, the lightship was anchored about 50 miles off Nantucket. (Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff file 2004)

For a once-majestic vessel whose luminous beacon long safeguarded Nantucket's treacherous waters, it is an ignoble fate: orphaned and slowly rusting off Long Island. In a cruel twist, the largest lightship ever built, a 1,000-ton titan that guided countless ships to port, cannot find safe harbor.

A New York maritime preservation group is offering the Nantucket Lightship LV-112, which has been passed from one port to the next for more than 30 years, to anyone who will agree to maintain it and keep it open to the public. The asking price - a mere $1.

But with the cost of relocating and restoring the ailing vessel likely to top $150,000, few interested parties have emerged to preserve the 1936 craft as a historic artifact.

"Lightships are very important to navigational history, and this is the granddaddy of them all," said Jerry Roberts, a trustee of the National Lighthouse Museum, which bought the Nantucket several years ago. "It needs a home."

Roberts had hoped the Nantucket would serve as a flagship for the planned museum, slated for a 10-acre site on Staten Island. But the project has stalled, perhaps permanently, and the floating lighthouse remains moored at Oyster Bay, Long Island, where it has sat, all but untended, for four years.

"We've waited and waited, but now we have to take action," he said. "The reality is, we've worn out our welcome."

In its glory days, the lightship Nantucket was anchored about 50 miles off Nantucket, at the outer fringes of a range of shoals that threatened trans-Atlantic crossings bound for the Eastern Seaboard. The 150-foot ship was the most remote manned lighthouse on earth, Roberts said, a shimmering signal that marked the mainland's first greeting.

"As ships came to America, long before they could see the Statue of Liberty they saw the Nantucket," he said.

The ship was retired from the Coast Guard in 1975 and has bounced among nonprofit organizations since. Two years ago, Roberts's group tried to sell the ship - also for $1. But it has been reluctant to sell to anyone who lacks the finances to restore the vessel.

"With some of these groups, it will be sold for scraps within two years," he said.

About 170 lightships were built to protect ships from offshore reefs, but only 13 remain, Roberts said. Many have been gutted and rebuilt for commercial purposes, such as an inn or a nightclub.

But Roberts holds out hope that a steward will step forward to maintain the craft as a national landmark, possibly as a historic attraction to anchor a waterfront tourist destination.

"We could probably sell it on eBay for about $100,000," he said. "But we don't want to see it turned into a floating clam bar."

Correction: Because of an editing error, a story in yesterday's City & Region section about efforts to find a home for the rusting Nantucket Lightship LV-112 included a photograph of the Nantucket Lightship WLV-612, which is fully operational and docked in Newport.