Big dreams: Painter decides to buy aging Maryland lighthouse

BALTIMORE (AP) — To call it a fixer-upper would be generous.

There’s no running water, no heat, no electricity.  Once one gets past the romance of buying a historic Chesapeake Bay lighthouse, there’s lead paint, asbestos and toxic benzene. Vandals broke down the door and seabirds died inside. Oh, it sits in about 18-feet of water within a U.S. Navy testing site called a “danger zone.”

Who wants the Hooper Island Lighthouse anyway?

When the federal government auctioned the 120-year-old lighthouse in September, as a last resort, a bidding war broke out. The price jumped from $15,000 to $38,000. Then $189,000.  “I was expecting nobody to want it,” said Greg Krawczyk, vice president of the Chesapeake chapter of the U.S. Lighthouse Society.

Five anonymous bidders wanted the rusty “spark plug,” so-called for its cylinder base and 70-foot tower, three miles off the coast of Dorchester County. In the end, someone paid $192,000.

“Odd Chesapeake Bay lighthouse sells for absurd sum at auction,” a website mocked.  The buyer remained a mystery until the clerk of court for Dorchester County recorded the deed on Dec. 27. It lists a name: Richard Cucé, of Bucks County, Pennsylvania.  One might have guessed a nonprofit foundation, but Cucé? He runs an industrial painting company outside Allentown. He knows rusty metal, but isn’t even a boater. What does a divorced father of four who plays in a band and teaches yoga want with a broken-down lighthouse 200 miles away?

Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the lighthouse remains distinctive for its watch room and lantern atop a four-story white tower. Keepers lit the tower on June 1, 1902, and it’s remained an aid to navigation for more than a century.

The solar-powered light shines today.

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