Nick Korstad loves lighthouses.
Sure, everyone loves lighthouses. They’re spooky and romantic and adorn some of our favorite Long Island tchotchkes.
But Nick doesn’t just buy tchotchkes with drawings of lighthouses on them. Nick actually buys lighthouses.
He’s owned about a half a dozen of them at one time or another. He used to own Borden Flats Lighthouse in Massachusetts and Spectacle Reef Lighthouse on Lake Huron but he’s since sold them. He currently owns Big Bay Point Lighthouse in Michigan and Browns Head Light in Maine, and he kept watch over the Stratford Shoal Lighthouse for about eight years.
Stratford Shoal Lighthouse is better known to Long Islanders as “The Middle Grounds” lighthouse. That granite building that flashes and bellows about every five seconds or so and sits about halfway between Port Jefferson and Bridgeport in Connecticut.
Nick owned that one.
He was more like a steward during that time and because of the intricacies of ownership and burden of government paperwork he let it go.
So, if you haven’t heard, it’s back on the market.
While the official listing says it’s located in Setauket, NY, that’s not exactly true. And that’s part of the reason why Nick doesn’t own the Stratford Shoal Lighthouse right now and why you can’t go there and play lightkeeper for a week at a time like he originally planned.
Photo: Nick Korstad (right) at Borden Flats Lighthouse that he has since sold, with friends Laurie McGee (center) and Tony Piatti.
It’s a long complicated story that has a lot of red tape and state rules and regulations but the bottom line is that while stewardship of the lighthouse was given to Nick the land it sits on was not. That was owned by the Constitution State aka Connecticut.
"The land it sat on wasn’t titled," Nick lamented. "The land had to be leased from Connecticut."
Nick had filled out hundreds of pages of paperwork to apply for stewardship, making all kinds of promises to preserve it and care for it to the US General Services Administration (USGSA), the agency that manages the transfer of Federally owned lighthouses. He made his intentions clear: he wanted to give the lantern a new coat of paint and do some other renovations and then turn it around to give people a chance to experience staying in a lighthouse for a week at a time.
But that did not jibe with regulations.
“The state thought it was more of a hotel,” he said. “Red flags came up.”
There was a Catch-22. If he applied for the use that the state wanted he was out of scope with the Federal government's agreement, which meant years of back and forth and hundreds more pages of paperwork.
The Stratford Shoal Lighhouse, which is going up for auction this June. Photo: Courtesy U.S. General Services Administration.
As much as he regretted it, without revenue he couldn’t justify financing the work needed to restore and upgrade the lighthouse and he’d already spent years on the project.
“I gave it back in 2022,” he said. “Eight years into the process I figured it’s best not to pursue it.”
Nick also felt that the lighthouse sitting fallow for ten more years was not good for the building.
So the Stratford Shoal Lighthouse is going up for auction on June 12 with a starting bid of $10,000. Nick isn’t going to try to buy it for a few reasons, one is that he’s sorta done with lighthouses you can only get to by boat. He is looking at a couple of others to add to his collection but both are on land.
There is a difference between what Nick planned to do as a steward, where no money changed hands for the transfer of the lighthouse, and what someone who buys the lighthouse can do. You still have to deal with the state of Connecticut and probably have to lease the land and pay property taxes but once you buy it, the structure is yours to do as you will.
“If sold at a government auction you can do whatever you want,” Nick said.
While the starting bid is $10,000, Nick thinks the lighthouse is worth $350,000 and he also thinks someone might put up the money for it.
“A lot of people have money and a multimillionaire can restore it and take a boat there for private use,” he said. “Someone who has deep pockets and wants a story to tell.”
Like a 2,000-square-foot trophy home in the middle of the Long Island Sound.
“And it looks like a trophy,” Nick joked.
Nick hasn’t been at the lighthouse since 2015 but he said it needs some TLC to fix it up. He estimated it would take an additional $500,000 to restore it. A bathroom needs to be added and the lantern painted, new windows and restoring the hardwood floors and of course, the cost of getting the workers out there to do the restoration. Otherwise, the two-and-a-half foot thick walls have held up well, according to Nick.
“It’s in really good shape,” he said.
