The street where I live in Perry, NY is lined with pyrus calleryana, better known as Bradford pear trees. The Bradford pear, despite its name, does not actually produce pears. At least, it doesn’t produce the kind of sweet, plump fruit you’d want to serve with a nice cheese plate.

The pears it bears are miniature– about a centimeter long, hard and bitter. If that’s not enough of a selling point, they also happen to be laced with cyanide. The good news is that these trees look beautiful, especially when they blossom each spring. The bad news is that they smell like an overflowing dumpster on day five of a summer seafood festival.

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Every spring the Bradford pear explodes with blossoms. Pink and white flowers envelop the long thin branches of each tree as though they’re screaming, “BEHOLD! SPRING HAS ARRIVED! I BEAR LIFE AS PROOF OF SPRING!”

Despite its strong presence here, the Bradford pear is not native to this region of New York (which is either “western NY” or “upstate NY” depending on the speaker’s proximity to New York City). In fact, it’s not even native to the United States of America.

Bradford pear trees were introduced to the U.S. by the USDA facility at Glenn Dale, Maryland, as ornamental landscape trees in the mid-1960s. They became popular with landscapers because they were inexpensive, transported well and grew quickly. The New York Times hyped the tree species in 1964 stating, “Few trees possess every desired attribute, but the Bradford ornamental pear comes unusually close to the ideal.”

I wonder if the New York Times ever smelled one in full bloom.

I, too, am an invasive species in Perry, NY.

I moved here at 26 looking for the geographical cure to non-geographical problems. The day I moved the buds on the Bradford pears were just beginning to open. That first spring I watched the trees explode with life and color from my little perch on the village’s main street. They promised me, a fellow New York state transplant, a future of growth and beauty and flourishing. In some ways, the Bradford Pear’s promise for my new life came true. There were vivid greens and sunshine mornings and the appearance of new branches fractaling up toward the vast blue sky.

In some ways, the imagined promise came true. But also like the Bradford pear – my new life in Perry occasionally stank.

“The beauty does not outweigh the risks,” argued one environmentalism student in a column for The Ithacan newspaper.

“Bradford has a poor crown structure and is prone to break up,” he warned in response to Ithaca College’s decision to plant the trees across campus. “Don’t get too attached.”

My life in Perry was prone to break up. The new growth I witnessed in those early spring days eventually died. The Bradford tree would go dormant. I’d feel the watching eyes of neighbors more native to this town, this region, this state. I’d hear “What are you even doing here?” their stares seemed to ask. “You will never belong.”

I could almost hear the desperate bare limbs of the tree swearing that one winter day they’d buckle and break under the weight of the endless snow. I would stare out at the branches chained by tiny ice crystals wondering if the Bradford pear felt as displaced as I did.

Did the tree ever resent being planted in between concrete slabs overlooking parked cars instead of on a sunny hilltop somewhere in the Korean peninsula?

Did the tree ever wish – if it HAD to be so far from its natural habitat – it could have at least ended up somewhere more interesting, like the Bradford pear planted by Lady Bird Johnson near the National Mall? But the pyrus calleryana knows trees only have two options: die or grow.

This tree keeps choosing the latter.

It lets the dying things die. It waits for the sun. It creates new buds, showing them to the world like little promises of possibility. It lets me know, year after year, when spring has arrived. When it does, I admire the brand new blossoms of the Bradford Pear — more growth, more joy, more flourishing.

I stand amazed at how the tree and I – two invasive species – endure.

Sometimes the beauty does outweigh the risks.

My “Empire in Review” essays — including this one — will be accompanied by shadow puppetry and mixed-media visual storytelling as part of the New York State Puppet Festival festival in Perry, NY on June 21, 2026. Get tickets now.

In 1932, Lucille Ball left a sleepy town in upstate New York for a stage career in New York City.

79 years later, I left a stage career in New York City for a sleepy town in upstate New York.

One of us went on to launch her own production company amid a period of personal pain, marital struggle and a long overdue divorce.

The other did all of that while becoming arguably the most recognizable and beloved television icon of all time.

I have loved Lucille Ball since I first watched her stomping grapes in black and white on Nick at Nite when I was seven or eight years old. While the adults took over the large screen TV in the living room to watch the nightly news and Jay Leno, my sister and I would retreat upstairs to our parent’s bedroom where they kept a 16” SONY television set. We’d be allowed to watch one of the classic sitcom episode Nickelodeon aired at night before brushing our teeth and going to bed. Almost always, at least in my memory, it was “I Love Lucy”.

We would lay on our stomachs on the plush, carefully made burgundy floral comforter, chins in our hands, laughing hysterically at the antics of Lucy, Ricky, Fred, and Ethel. Like Lucy Ricardo, I wanted to be in show business. Every episode I rooted for her to get her chance even while I giggled at the character’s supposed ineptitude. Looking back with an adult’s understanding, I know I was enchanted by Lucy’s mastery of physical comedy, the way she blended clownishness with elegance, her delivery of slap-happy humor with a razor sharp edge. But as a kid? That shit is just funny.

But I am not here to tell you about Lucille Ball, an actress and entertainment pioneer better known as “Lucy” who was born in Jamestown, NY and died in 1989. I am here to tell you about Lucille Ball, an outdoor sculpture and travesty better known as “Scary Lucy” mounted in a humble grassy park in Celeron, NY in 2009. If Real Lucy is the most beloved former citizen of Celeron, a village bordering Jamestown on the shore of Chautauqua Lake, Scary Lucy might be the most detested.

Her ability to inspire fear, revulsion and second hand embarrassment in all who cross her path gained her quick infamy in the Jamestown community. Scary Lucy occasionally gets a brief moment of Internet fame when content mills run out of new ideas and employ her photo for some good old fashioned engagement farming.

That’s how I discovered Scary Lucy.

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Allegany County, New York, 2013

The choice I made to flee from a fledgling dance career in NYC led me to a rural hamlet in western New York, about an hour’s drive from Jamestown. By age 24, I had a 2 year-old son, a husband struggling with addiction, and a job teaching dance that barely – and often didn’t – cover the bills. We’d rented a 19th century farmhouse on 40 acres of beautiful fields, hills, and woods. It was someone’s idea of paradise but definitely not mine.

One morning, as the toddler flung scrambled eggs off his breakfast plate and the crushing loneliness of being surrounded by cows threatened to engulf me, I did what depressed millennials do best: I opened Twitter.

Scrolling past hot takes about health care bills and chicken sandwiches, my thumb paused when I saw a familiar face in black and white.

“The Lucy nobody loves lives in Jamestown, NY,” the tweet said alongside a still of Lucille Ball’s face from what could be any episode of I Love Lucy. Seeing her felt like a little wave and a wink from an old friend. I clicked the link in the tweet which brought me to a Buzzfeed article.

SCARY LUCY STATUE HORRIFIES LUCY FANS, a headline read.

Buzzfeed (R.I.P.) as an editorial platform was not exactly known for its commitment to reasonable, balanced viewpoints and thoughtful reflection. I had a little bit of healthy skepticism about the whole “Scary Lucy” moniker as I scrolled down on the page to the photo of the sculpture in question.

How scary can a statue be? Especially when that statue is of something as universally cherished and, largely, benign as America’s favorite classic TV icon?

As it turns out, pretty scary.

I didn’t spend much time taking in Scary Lucy’s appearance from that first photo. I do remember thinking that she looked more like a cross between an inebriated Dean Martin and Donny Osmond in drag than Lucille Ball (a belief I continue to hold). After scanning the text of the article, I learned that Scary Lucy was created in Jamestown then donated to the nearby Village of Celeron by her original owner.

Understandable, I thought. If I owned that sculpture, I’d give it away, too.

The shriek of an impatient toddler lurched me back to reality. I put down my phone and went back to a life I couldn’t love but also couldn’t seem to fix.

Jamestown, Chautauqua County, NY - 2021

“If I had known Jamestown was going to be that careless, I’d have been born somewhere else.” - Lucy Ricardo

Six years later, a pair of hotel doors slides open and I step out into the late June morning air. Sunlight dances on the surface of Lake Chautauqua in front of me and the sky’s so blue it looks like someone put it in photoshop and dialed up the saturation by a thousand. It’s the kind of western New York summer day that makes all the long winters seem worth it. This weekend I’m rewarding myself for surviving: my now ex-husband is gone (to Ohio, not to the grave, although some say they’re the same thing). My son is almost nine and thriving. I’m in love with someone who never bores me. Winter is over and I’m taking a weekend trip to Chautauqua lake to celebrate with a waterfront hotel stay.

That’s what I tell my family, anyway.

I step off of the hotel terrace and amble down the stone path toward the dock, clutching a paper cup of weak hotel coffee in one hand and my phone in the other. Under different circumstances, I’d relish the opportunity to dangle my feet off the edge of the dock and sip my coffee while watching the boats come and go. Today, though, I’m single-mindedly focused on the real reason I chose Celeron for my lake getaway: Scary Lucy.

I take a right before the dock and make toward a yellow gate separating the private hotel grounds from the public park. Swinging the gate open, I scan the park for the statue the Paris Review once called “a disasterpiece.” It doesn’t take me long to spot her, standing with her back to a parking lot looking out toward the lake. As I get closer, the sculpture’s distorted features grow into focus.

At the risk of sounding too much like one of those aforementioned click bait headlines. Nothing could have prepared me for the sight of Scary Lucy in the flesh – I mean, the metal.

There’s an episode of I Love Lucy where Lucy attempts to take up sculpture art. An art supply salesman works to convince Lucy she possesses hidden natural talent for the discipline. She grabs a hunk of modeling clay at his insistence and fidgets with it.

That’s more or less the amount of artistic skill that seems to have been involved in the creation of this particular piece of art.

Scary Lucy stands about 6 feet tall. It is made of a material I assume to be bronze but will have to fact check because I know nothing about bronze, sculptures or bronze sculptures. Scary Lucy is shaped vaguely like a human and yet not like any living person I have ever met. Her features are undeniably masculine with a broad forehead and ape-ish jaw. She is slouched forward, a hump emerging at the top of her dingy gray back. She holds a flask-like bottle in one hand and a spoon in the other. The ankle length skirt around her narrow legs has no suggestion of movement or life and the double stranded necklace draped over her unsettlingly rough collar bone resembles a noose, or a string of human teeth more than pearls.

It’s the eyes, though, that really get me. Scary Lucy’s eyes are wide, open and blank. Her empty gaze appears fixed on a point in the middle distance. They’re cavernous in a way that feels menacing. She could be hypnotized or hypnotist. The fact that I can’t decide which leaves me more unsettled. The word “Vitameatavegamin” etched on the bottle in Scary Lucy’s hand offers the sculpture’s only clue that it has anything to do with Lucille Ball. It’s a reference to one of I Love Lucy’s most memorable episodes, “Lucy Does a T.V. Commercial” in which Lucy gets accidentally sloshed on live TV.

A bold choice to sculpt, I think. What makes that episode so memorable is Lucy’s physicality, her delivery of slurred lines, the way she knows how to hold for a laugh without stopping the forward momentum of the scene. Even the best artists would have trouble capturing that essence in statute-form.

Scanning Scary Lucy gives me a new understanding of the word “grotesque.” I didn’t really understand the depths to which a work of art could embody a visceral grotesqueness until now. If A.I. generated art brings us to the Uncanny Valley, Scary Lucy brings us to the Grotesque Grotto, a cave where the human is purposefully distorted and humor rubs bony elbows with horror.

Because seeing Scary Lucy in person, I realize there’s another ingredient of the grotesque no one ever really talks about: the funny. Scary Lucy is so grotesque and such a poor representation of Real Lucy that, at least in the bright light of a June morning on Chautauqua Lake, she is funny.

She makes you think “How ridiculous!” She inspires you to snap a photo and text it to a friend. “What was the artist thinking?” she makes you ask.

I take a seat on a nearby bench, set my coffee on the ground, open my phone and type “Scary Lucy artist” into the search bar of the browser.

Dave Poulin is best known – or blamed, I guess – for Scary Lucy but I soon discover his work as an artist and educator is prolific. Born in 1961, Poulin spent most of his career in the greater Jamestown, NY area where he taught art in public schools and helped form the department of Performing and Visual Arts at St. Bonaventure University. After leaving academia to open an art studio and gallery in downtown Jamestown in 1997, Poulin found success creating public art projects and private pieces on commission. Over the next twenty years, he’d sculpt more than 120 pieces of art, most of them bronze sculptures installed at schools and parks in western New York and northwestern Pennsylvania.

Unable to shake his love for teaching, Poulin also created a grant-funded education program fusing storytelling with sculpting. Elementary students would write essays and use molding clay to give visual representation to their written words. Poulin would then turn the models into sculpture.

At some point in this journey, a private art collector approached Poulin about creating a likeness of Lucille Ball. In a later interview, Poulin recalls that it was among his first attempts at creating a portrait-style sculpture.

“Unfortunately, at that point in my life, I came up short,” Dave Poulin told a reporter in 2015. “I was not able to rise to the challenge.”

It’s unclear whether Poulin considered Scary Lucy a failure at the time of its creation. If he didn’t yet, he certainly did when Scary Lucy became a public commodity. Poulin responded to the outrage by offering to fix the statue or create a replacement at no cost. For whatever reason – politics or timing or the public’s lack of trust in Poulin’s abilities – that never happened.

Dave Poulin gave away his $15,000 worth of sculpting tools in the summer of 2016. He moved to South Carolina to teach welding, leaving Scary Lucy and his public art career behind him. Four years later, Dave Poulin died suddenly of a heart embolism. He was 59.

I take a few minutes to look at samples of Poulin’s other sculptures, curious if they share Scary Lucy’s energy. While none of the images I see embody the same grotesque quality, it’s obvious Dave had a signature style. His figures are imp-ish and surrealist; they seem intentionally designed to look a little otherworldly, a little alien. By the looks of it, he does not seem to have bothered to learn how to shape women’s faces. Still, none of these pieces are even a tiny bit as terrible as Scary Lucy. As Poulin said himself, Scary Lucy is “by far my most unsettling sculpture.”

After taking a selfie with Scary Lucy, I turn my back on her. There’s another Lucy here I want to see.

A squirrel bounces across the path and up a nearby tree. A silver-haired woman in a track suit jogs along the lake. 75 feet of walkway lead me to the center of the park where the unmistakable likeness of Lucille Ball in shimmering copper greets me. “New Lucy” as she’s known, was created by noted portrait sculpture artist Carolyn Palmer and unveiled in 2016.

She is the yang to Scary Lucy’s yin, showing a smiling Lucy mid-stride, hand on hip[. Lucy captured at her prime. She’s everything you want a monument to an important and beloved entertainer to be. And honestly? I find her boring. New Lucy is a safe, humorless, Disney princess version of the woman who once said she’d rather “regret the things she’d done, than regret the things she hadn’t.” No one is laughing at her. No one is laughing at all.

I turn back to the monstrosity of Scary Lucy where a pair of teenage girls is now attempting to taking a selfie. They’ve put a paper bag over Scary Lucy’s head and each flung one arm around her. Taking the photo proves difficult because they cannot stop giggling. I recognize their laughter – it’s the uncontrollable joy of being young, alone with your best friend and high on the power of what feels like the world’s funniest inside joke. It reminds me of floating with my sister on a Lucy-shaped cloud of comedy all those years ago. I offer to take the girls’ photo and as I snap a couple of shots, I think about the tragedy wrapped up inside Scary Lucy’s comedy: that Dave Poulin will be forever best known for the worst thing he ever made.

Then I figure out what really scares me about this Lucy. This figure is the bronze and steel embodiment of my worst fears: that my contributions to the world are bad. That what I make and do and say is worthy of ridicule. That people will laugh – or are already laughing — at me and unlike Real Lucy, I am not in on the joke.

When I first learned about Scary Lucy, I was trapped by the consequences of my choices – choices that demonstrated poor skill and serious lack of judgment. Like David Poulin, I got better but never perfect.

In a news story about his life, Poulin’s wife Connie remembered, “He was confident in his abilities [to make art], communicate and treat people well [ . . . confident and calm.”

I long for that confidence.

I don’t trust myself not to make any Scary Lucys. I want to keep any of my would-be metaphorical sculptures hidden behind white sheets. There, no one one can petition for their removal, put paper bags over their heads or make them the butt of an easy joke.

As I turn to leave Lucille Ball Memorial Park, I start to think about its namesake.

What if Lucille Ball’s name were forever linked to her biggest flop instead of her biggest success? For all of her hits, Lucy’s career stats feature plenty of misses.

“Life with Lucy” was an objectively cringey 1986 sitcom that was cancelled after eight episodes. Even her acclaimed original sitcom has a few stinkers in the mix. (Remember the one that inexplicably takes place in Scottish fever dream where Lucy plays the bagpipes in a kilt and Fred and Ethel play a two-headed dragon?)

Instead, we remember the best of Lucy. The time she stuffed a chef’s hat full of chocolate candies. The grape stomping. The expert slurring of “Veeta-vita-meetee-moo..”

In that same newspaper story a friend and art colleague Michael Hill remembered of Dave, “I think looking at his life as a portfolio is far more important than looking at it as a single piece. The body of work speaks to a man that was selfless in his teaching . . . and always believed that beauty was there to be unlocked.”

After learning so much about Dave Poulin, part of me wants to defend his best known work, to push back against the second hand embarrassment I feel for him.

I want to argue that Scary Lucy provides value to the world by virtue of being so terrible. Her absurdity in a prickly world renders her lovable. I want to point out that the best art is the art that makes us feel things, that gets us talking. I am tempted to quote Bob Ross – another eccentric TV personality of my childhood – and declare, “We don’t make mistakes! Just happy accidents.”

But as I sit on the bench looking out at this hideous piece of art, I know that we do sometimes make mistakes. Dave Poulin made mistakes. Lucille Ball made mistakes. I made mistakes and I will keep making them.

Very little space in Dave Poulin’s obituary is given to the art he made. Instead it highlights his deep love for his family and his generosity toward his community and his students.

Notes left in the announcement of Dave’s passing tell a story of a man whose legacy is far greater and more powerful than any piece of bronze. “He loved and was loved,” wrote one friend. “He introduced me to the world of art,” wrote a former student.

It’s proof to me that our mistakes don’t have to define our legacies, even if the whole world wants them to. Dave Poulin made an attempt at creating something. It was bad. He learned from it, I expect. And he kept living a life the best way he could: loving and being loved.

When I think about the mistakes that led me to that farmhouse in my early twenties, I also think about the happy accidents: A son whom I adore; a teaching career that I love as much as Dave seems to have loved his; a partner who would love me even if everything I made was as terrible as Scary Lucy.

When I die, my obituary will probably mention my jobs, maybe even that brief dance career I bitterly regretted leaving. But it will definitely mention the people I loved. I am not a single piece of art, fixed in bronze, awaiting validation from passersby and critics. I’m not, as Michael Hill remembered his friend, even a “portfolio of work.”

I’m a person who can only live the best way I can: to love, be loved, and, now and then, to make someone laugh – even at the risk of being laughed at. I’d rather, in the words of Lucy, regret the things I’ve done than the things I haven’t.

Before I leave Celeron the next day, I stop back at the park for one last look at the two Lucys. When I get there, a middle aged couple is admiring New Lucy.

“She doesn’t look scary! Does she look scary? They said she was scary!” the woman remarks to her partner. She’s wearing a t-shirt with the heart-shaped I Love Lucy logo printed in the center.

“Scary Lucy is over there,” I tell her, gesturing in the sculpture’s direction.

“Oh, I didn’t know there were two of them,” she says to me. “All I keep hearing about is that I need to see Scary Lucy!” She takes a left and struts down the path toward Dave Poulin’s best known work. I hear a burst of laughter. “Oh. My. God. Honey, you have to look at her!”

Without a second thought, the man turns away from the beautiful sculpture and hurries to find the Lucy who will make him laugh.

Empire in Review: Reflections from the Little Places of Great New York is made possible with funds from the Statewide Community Regrants Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and administered in Allegany and Wyoming counties by the Arts Council for Wyoming County.

I am deeply grateful to the ACWC for continuing to make opportunities available for artists to make new work and share it with the public.

Washington Heights, Manhattan, NY

New York City does not suffer from a deficiency of universally recognizable landmarks. Jeffrey’s Hook Lighthouse is not one of them. You won’t find its plastic likeness sold on keychains at JFK airport. Its image is not printed onto t-shirts or tote bags accompanied by the message “I HEART NY.” Tourists don’t gawk at the lighthouse from the top deck of a sightseeing bus while a theatre school drop-out tour guide boils down its 140 year-old history to a quippy two-sentence nugget.

This is not to disparage Jeffrey’s Hook Lighthouse, but it has a few qualities working against it in the “iconic NYC landmark” category. For one thing, it is almost entirely obscured from view by the George Washington Bridge. Considering the primary purpose of a lighthouse is to be visible, this is not ideal. For another thing, it’s inconvenient to access from almost anywhere in Manhattan. More on that later. And thirdly, it’s name is “Jeffrey’s Hook” which sounds more like a hereditary bone disease than a romantic urban landmark. The unfortunate name choice has been remedied by New Yorkers who are not known to adhere to official place names when talking about their city. For the majority of this essay, I’ll refer to this unfortunately named non-iconic landmark by its much more charming nickname: “Little Red Lighthouse.”

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The Little Red Lighthouse lives, like I once did, in the shadow of the George Washington Bridge. I wish I could say I discovered this neighborhood curiosity by accident. That I took a wrong turn coming out of the subway, or gallantly ran after a purse snatcher only to find myself staring up at a mysterious red lighthouse standing tall over the Hudson River. New Yorkers in stories are always unexpectedly stumbling into magic or romance or life-changing opportunities. Meanwhile New Yorkers in real life are unexpectedly stumbling into clouds of bus exhaust and subway cars full of rats thirsty for revenge. Unless you’re a reckless boatman traversing the Hudson River without a map, seeing Jeffrey’s Hook Lighthouse requires a degree of intentionality. You more or less have to seek it out.

And that’s what I did.

On a sweltering July evening, I left my studio apartment on Riverside Drive to see what the man at the bodega had called the “little red lighthouse” very much on purpose.

“You new in the neighborhood?” he asked a week earlier, handing me a paper cup of black coffee from behind the counter. I was learning that in Washington Heights, people noticed each other. They paid attention. So accustomed had I become to the state of perpetual anonymity I experienced in my first two years in New York City, that this startled me at first. My neighbors introduced themselves to me. Old women sweeping stoops nodded at me when I walked past.

“New here but been in the city a couple of years,” I said, accepting the coffee with one hand and passing him a dollar and change with the other.

“Welcome to the best neighborhood in the city,” he said.

I nodded in thanks and turned to leave, steaming coffee in hand. By the time I reached the door, the man was ringing up the next customer, speaking Spanish and smiling like they were sharing an inside joke.

Overall, I’d felt welcome in Washington Heights so far. Instead of dreading returning to my apartment at the end of each day at my temp job, as I had when I lived with five roommates in midtown, I looked forward to it. I loved arriving at the 181st st. subway station, riding up the long escalator, hearing the music from car radios and boom boxes grow louder as we approached street level. I was a heroine emerging from the underworld to the bright warmth of home. Maybe it wasn’t my home exactly but it was at least someone’s home.

I returned to that same bodega the next morning, and the next, developing a rare ritual of affordable convenience. (In Washington Heights in 2010, you could still get a strong cup of coffee for a dollar.) Leon and I developed a routine of sorts. As he poured my coffee from a glass carafe that looked old enough to have served in a couple of world wars, he would tell me about other places in Washington Heights I needed to check out.

“Don’t be one of those commuters who spends their free time downtown too,” he told me one morning. “You live here, you get to know the barrio, deal?”

Leon, I soon realized, was the kind of New Yorker convinced that he and he alone holds the deepest, truest secrets of the city. Rather than keep the secrets, these New Yorkers love to prove their own knowledge to you at every given opportunity. They give you directions you didn’t ask for to places you never wanted to go. They admonish every visitor attraction, bar or restaurant you mention to them, then provide you with an alternate list of recommendations deemed superior.

Leon did different versions of this each morning during our quick two-minute interactions. He started by telling me which blocks to avoid at night if I was on my own. (“They’re not dangerous, just annoying,” he explained) and went on to provide me with a list of “bests” in Washington Heights.

Best joints for mofongo.

Best street stall for fresh fruit.

Best bakery.

Best cheap beer.

Best views of the Hudson.

Leon was big on the word “best.”

Unlike many of Leon’s suggestions, visiting the Little Red Lighthouse was both free and legal. So, that weekend, I set out to find it in Fort Washington Park.

**

I had never visited Fort Washington Park or even heard of it, despite living about 50 yards away. While I could almost see the entrance to Fort Washington Park from the top of my building’s front steps on Riverside Drive, the Henry Hudson Highway made getting there a giant pain in the ass. Following the handwritten directions I’d copied from my laptop (I did not yet own a smart phone), I ambled north along Riverside almost half a mile to cross the both north and southbound lanes of the highway via a narrow pedestrian bridge. The steady roar of traffic below made me think of snapping alligators circling a pirate’s ship while a helpless victim walks a splintery plank.

From the tiny bridge, I followed a paved trail through a grassy plot of Fort Washington Park south back in the direction of my apartment. Any pleasantness of the green space surrounding me was diluted by the unavoidable view of traffic barreling up and down the depressing highway, and the distinct lack of features typical of other New York City parks: playgrounds full of kids, stony-faced joggers, dog walkers, benches engraved with memories of departed friends. This was a park cut off from the city’s natural pedestrian flow.

The GWB looked different from this side of the highway. It was not a backdrop to a lively urban neighborhood, but a formidable giant guarding Manhattan from the rest of the world. Although I was on the island here, I felt suspended –like the twin decks of the bridge itself– in some in-between state.

Walking under the bridge’s abatement where cars roll the final few feet to the W. 181st street exit, I arrived at my destination.

The Little Red Lighthouse looked out of place on the rocky Manhattan shoreline. Despite standing at a respectable 41 feet, its proximity to the soaring span of the GWB made it appear comically small. In fact, I realized upon approach, every notable feature of the Little Red Lighthouse was notable because of its stark contrast with its surroundings. Massive silver trestles and cables looming overhead contrasted with the whimsy of a structure that resembles a child’s toy, a bright red splash on a canvas of gray steel, stone and cement. And while the bridge above served a constant, necessary function in the operations of the city, I considered, the lighthouse no longer served any practical purpose. Except I supposed, to remind us that boats and waterways once played the role now filled by cars and highways. The thought depressed me as much as the highway.

As it turns out, there’s not much to do at The Little Red Lighthouse other than look at it. “I don’t know why people love that lighthouse,” Leon had said. “But they do.” He’d paused then said, “and I do too,” as though he was just now realizing it.

I did not visit during one of the days the Lighthouse is open for tours, so I strolled around its base, looking up at the small black lantern room on top. A plaque affixed to the metal gate surrounding the lighthouse told me a little bit about its history. I learned that the lighthouse, like so many New York City residents, originally from New Jersey. Another sign informed me that this slice of Manhattan was called “Jeffrey’s Hook” in reference to the shape of the shoreline, jutting out into the Hudson River sharply giving the island a few hundred meters of extra width before zig-zagging inward again. Before the construction of the George Washington Bridge, ships traversing the Hudson often failed to account for this hook and disaster inevitably followed. An uptick in such accidents resulted in the Little Red Lighthouse getting re-assigned to Jeffrey’s Hook in 1921, where its contrasting color and battery-operated glow helped vessels stay on course.

I stared out at the Hudson River for a few minutes, sweating in the July heat. A white-haired man with a lined face stood at an overlook nearby pointing his DSLR in the direction of the bridge. A woman in a track suit with black hair piled high on the crown of her head power walked past talking animatedly into a cell phone in a language I didn’t recognize. The sun shifted so and we were no longer shadowed by the bridge. The high noon sun shone down on the Little Red Lighthouse and me, a little blonde 20 year-old beside it, turning Jeffrey’s Hook into a ferocious inferno typical of a Manhattan summer. I decided to head back toward W. 181st street to cool off on a shaded bench with an iced drink. I turned my back on the Little Red Lighthouse, thinking I might return when the weather is more tolerable to read or study or have a long chat with a friend while looking out over Fort Lee. I never did.

***

I moved out of Washington Heights, and left New York City entirely, less than a year later but found myself thinking about the neighborhood – that “someone else’s home” – all the time. Remembering the whoosh of cars as they barreled past my bedroom window exiting the George Washington Bridge, the $1 coffees and unsolicited advice from Leon, and the sense of welcome mingled with un-belonging.

Years later, in a used bookstore on the other side of the Hudson I found the Little Red Lighthouse again, this time by accident. Or I found the book that, as it turns out, is partially responsible for the lighthouse’s continued existence.

The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge is a 1942 picture book by Hildegaard Swift with Illustrations by Lynd Ward. It was Ward’s illustration of the Little Red Lighthouse that caught my eye, a fairly accurate rendering of the red tower standing against the steel weaves of the GWB against a midnight blue sky over the Hudson. I thought of Leon and Washington Heights and the best parts of New York and I brought the book home.

In Swift’s story the anthropomorphized “red, round, very, very proud” lighthouse is a plucky hero performing the life-saving task of helping ships avoid danger, with the help of the man who comes to turn on his light each night. “I am MASTER OF THE RIVER,” says the lighthouse. When a gargantuan gray structure grows higher and higher, connecting land on both sides of the river, our hero grows anxious. The bridge’s light shines higher and brighter than his own.

“Now I am needed no longer,” he says. “My light is so little and this one so big.”

But when a tug boat gets caught in a storm coming in from Albany, the bridge calls down to the lighthouse. “I call to the ships of the air,’ says the bridge, “but you are still master of the river. Quick! Let your light shine again. Each to his own place, little brother.”

The book’s central thesis is that everyone has their “own place”, that just because something newer and bigger and brighter than you comes along doesn’t mean you’re not still needed and wanted. Swift imagined a world in which the old lighthouse and new bridge play complementary roles. In reality the 600 foot blinking bright towers of the GWB, completed in 1931 made the lighthouse redundant. Its light really wasn’t needed after all.

In 1947, the Port Authority of New York officially decommissioned Jeffrey’s Hook Lighthouse. The abandoned lantern tower was slated to be demolished and sold as a scrap metal. As it turns out, it was not a torrential storm that saved the Little Red Lighthouse from demolition. It was Swift’s story.

By 1951, the year the city condemned the lighthouse, The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge had been read by hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren. Hearing news of the demolition plan, children organized a letter writing campaign begging the city to save the “red, round, very, very proud” lighthouse. Their efforts succeeded and New York City Department of Parks & Recreation took over ownership of Jeffrey’s Hook Lighthouse. In the end, the Little Red Lighthouse was worth saving because someone imagined it to be worth saving.

When I visit Washington Heights today, I notice how different it looks from this side of adulthood. Leon’s bodega is still there but someone else is always behind the counter. The coffee is weaker, worse, and costs $2.50. Most of Leon’s “best of” recommendations have closed or been transformed into dispensaries or banks or novelty pop-ups. But the buzz of the neighborhood endures. People still pay attention. I feel Home.

If I have time, I take that out-of-the-way trek across the footbridge to Fort Washington Park and gaze up at the Little Red Lighthouse. I imagine being its keeper, climbing up the iron staircase and switching on the light. The Little Red Lighthouse is, for all intents and purposes, unemployed. It has no job to do, no promise to fulfill. Its light shines because we decided a world with more light was preferable to world with more scrap metal. It shines because of Hildegard Swift and Lynd Ward and thousands of children. It shines because Leon loves it – and I do too.

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Empire in Review: Reflections from the Little Places of Great New York is made possible with funds from the Statewide Community Regrants Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and administered in Allegany and Wyoming counties by the Arts Council for Wyoming County.

I am deeply grateful to the ACWC for continuing to make opportunities available for artists to make new work and share it with the public.

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My name is Sarah. I’m a writer and I’m obsessed with New York.

A writer? Writing about New York? Groundbreaking.

Empire in Review is not here to add yet more entries to the overstuffed folio of essays, love songs, break-up letters, and hot takes about New York City. It is neither love song nor break up letter. Its takes are room temperature and it is not about New York City.

At least, it’s not only about New York City.

What is EMPIRE IN REVIEW?

New York does not suffer from lack of notable landmarks. The places I write about here are not among them. I’m more interested in the smaller, more esoteric, less written-about facets of the state — what I call the little places of great New York.

I was raised in Texas but I like to say I got to New York as fast as I could. I’ve lived in the empire state since a few months before I turned 18, residing in its many disparate built and natural environments over nearly two decades. From a high-rise college dorm in midtown Manhattan, to a questionably legal windowless room in Brooklyn, to a 19th century farmhouse in Amish country, the New York places I’ve lived, worked and experienced intimately color the way I see and interact with the world.

In Empire in Review, I write about the places where my little life brushes up with greater forces of human progress, history, meaning, and empire in New York State.

I hope reading these pieces encourages you to consider the own places in your life — big and small — with fresh perspective. Often the familiar looks to us like the mundane. Our home towns seem boring. We crave novelty and notoriety and anything other than what we no.

Maybe your hometown actually is ugly or problematic or full of buried memories you’d rather not disturb. Many of the places reviewed in this project fit that description. But while no place is perfect, every place is worth of fascination.

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Empire in Shadow : a puppetry collaboration

Four essays from Empire in Review will be turned into SHADOW PUPPETRY performances in collaboration with my friend Pilar McKay performed in February 2026.

If you’re local to Perry, NY come see us workshop some of these at Theater at 37 at a First Friday works-in-progress showing on October 3rd at 7 p.m.

Get Tickets and information

Empire in Review is made possible with funds from the Statewide Community Regrants Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and administered in Allegany and Wyoming counties by the Arts Council for Wyoming County.