Group hopes to rebuild lighthouse

• By MARY FOSTER
• Associated Press writer
• Published: Jul 5, 2008 - Page: 5B - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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NEW ORLEANS — Stephanie Bruno remembers long summer days on the lakefront, picnics, playing in the water, and the old lighthouse stacked in red-roofed layers, ending in a pert little cupola.

“If you grew up in New Orleans, the lighthouse was part of your life,” Bruno said. “The building was such a marvel. It was an exciting and unusual kind of place.”

The New Canal Lighthouse stood on the edge of Lake Pontchartrain since 1890, its light a beacon to mariners and landlubbers alike.

Hurricane Katrina unleashed a 15-foot-high wall of water that knocked the lighthouse off its foundation and left it beached and crumpled.

Finally, with so much of the city struggling to rebuild, the remains of the lighthouse were dismantled and put into storage.

“We hope that getting the lighthouse re-established will help anchor the rest of the Lakeshore area that really needs to come back,” said Anne Rheams, deputy director of the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation, which is leading efforts to rebuild the lighthouse.

The foundation estimates it will take $800,000 to restore the lighthouse and has raised about $200,000 so far.

Energizing the project is a promotion by a company that makes doors and windows. The company plans to donate doors and windows to one of 12 lighthouses. When word of the promotion got out, it started showing up in e-mails throughout the area.

“It’s crazy,” Rheams said. “We hadn’t even officially sent out word about it and somehow people found out and started sending it around. I’ve had a dozen e-mails about it.”

JELD-WEN, an Oregon company, started the lighthouse project in 2006, after it had completed a pilot project on the Oregon coast.
Votes from the public are only part of the selection process, said company spokeswoman Lynne Butterworth.

“Most lighthouses need more than windows and doors,” Butterworth said. “We want to be sure there is ongoing community support for the rest of the restoration that needs to be done.”

JELD-WEN, which donated its products to two lighthouses last year, invited the public to nominate lighthouses and received about 70 nominations of 50 lighthouses. The 12 finalists were selected from them.

The Lake Pontchartrain lighthouse was decommissioned in 2000 as part of the U.S. Coast Guard’s overall closing of lighthouses, Rheams said. But residents have always planned to have the old building remain on the shore of the lake.