Manistee's North Pierhead Light and its rare wind-proof catwalk

The strange part isn’t the little red lighthouse at the end of Manistee’s north pier — it’s the raised steel walkway leading out to it, standing on legs above the concrete. That’s a catwalk, and it solved an old, dangerous problem. When a gale piled waves clean over the pier, the keeper still had to reach the light to tend it. So he climbed up onto the catwalk and walked above the storm instead of being swept off by it.

The lighthouse you see now is a tidy cast-iron tower, about 39 feet tall, put up in 1927 to mark the river mouth where the Manistee River empties into Lake Michigan. The steel catwalk dates to roughly the same era, replacing an earlier wooden one. Most towns eventually tore their catwalks down — once the lights ran on electricity and didn’t need a keeper braving the waves, the walkways were just maintenance and rust. Manistee’s survived, which makes it one of only a few left anywhere on Lake Michigan’s east shore.

It nearly didn’t. By the late 1980s the catwalk was in rough shape and on borrowed time, until a local “Save the Catwalk” push — led by the chamber of commerce — raised the money to fix it. The city took ownership of the catwalk in 1990 and refurbished it, and years later the lighthouse itself passed to the city and the county historical museum, which now looks after it.

You reach all of this on foot. The Manistee Riverwalk threads behind downtown and along the river out toward First Street Beach and the pier, so you can stroll from coffee downtown to a 1927 lighthouse and stand at the edge of the lake, the catwalk running out ahead of you like a thought that refuses to get its feet wet.