For the better part of a year, the walk out to the end of the breakwater didn't end at a lighthouse. It ended at a construction project wearing a lighthouse's outline: a black tarp pulled tight over scaffolding, hiding a tower that Mayor Ted Neitzke himself joked looked like something out of Star Wars. Locals who made the half-mile walk anyway, because the walk itself is the point, got used to seeing the shroud instead of the shine.
This fall, that changes. The Fall Street Festival takes over historic Franklin Street on Saturday, October 3, and for the first time since the restoration began, the lighthouse at the end of that walk is actually finished.
What Was Actually Wrong With It
The Breakwater Lighthouse has stood at the end of Port Washington's north pier since 1935, an Art Deco tower on a cement arched base, built the same year as its cousins in Indiana Harbor and Huron Harbor. The city didn't even own it until 2018, when it took title from the Coast Guard after the structure was declared surplus. Ownership came with an obligation: maintain it. By then the tower had gone rusty and weathered from decades of lake spray, and the portholes had etched and clouded from constant contact with waves.
Fixing it wasn't simple. City Engineer Roger Strohm has explained why the crew couldn't just tent the whole structure and strip it down over a season the way you'd repaint a house. The lighthouse is an active navigational aid, so the light has to stay visible at all times. The tower is coated in old lead paint, which meant no chips could be allowed to fall into the lake, and the metal corrodes fast enough in the lake air that leaving it bare even overnight risks the new paint peeling before it's cured. Add the difficulty of getting equipment to a structure sitting a half mile out on a pier, and a straightforward repaint turned into a multi-year sequencing problem.
The funding took its own path first. The city asked the state for $2.5 million back in 2021, got a $40,000 engineering-study grant in 2022, and finally landed the money that mattered in September 2024: a $2,231,900 grant from the Wisconsin Department of Transportation's Transportation Alternative Program, covering most of an estimated $2.8 million project. Work began the following spring, with TMI Coatings running the restoration and Legacy Architecture of Sheboygan handling the technical drawings.
Last Year's Festival Happened Mid-Project
By August 2025, the black shroud had come off and the tower had its first coat of bright white paint, but the job was far from done. Scaffolding still ringed the base. Crews still needed to patch old sampling holes in the concrete, cover graffiti stains at the base, caulk the seams between metal plates, and repaint the railings. The portholes were still broken, and the city was still hunting for the right inch-thick glass to replace them, since you can't order replacement panes for a 1935 structure from a standard supplier.
That means last year's Fall Street Festival crowd, the ones who wandered down to the water after the vendor tents, found the city's most photographed structure still mid-repair. The full restoration wasn't confirmed complete until this January, when Spectrum News 1 reported the $2.6 million project had wrapped: windows replaced, foundation cracks fixed, lead paint gone. By March, the city was calling it finished outright, with Neitzke describing the tower as a reflection of who Port Washington is as a city, resilient and connected to its waterfront.
There's a quieter payoff to the timing, too. The lease renewal that came with this project didn't just cover the lighthouse. It also renewed the safety ladders and life rings along the breakwater, which had lapsed in 2023, and a separate agreement covering the rubblemound near Rotary Park, which had expired the year before. Both are now locked in for 25 years. The walk out to the light isn't just freshly painted this fall. The infrastructure that makes it safe to walk at all just got secured for a generation.
Strohm's read on who benefits first wasn't sightseers. It was the people who fish off the end of the pier, now that the full breakwater is open again for the first time in years.
The Festival Gives You a Reason to Go Look
Fall Street Festival runs from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on October 3, with Franklin Street closed to traffic for the day. A few specifics worth knowing if you're planning around it:
- Two live music stages run all day, including sets from Shotgun Jane and Conscious Pilot
- More than 100 artisan vendors set up alongside a harvest farmers market
- The car and vintage motorcycle show takes over Pier Street
- A family fun zone runs bounce houses, pumpkin decorating, and games
- Admission, parking, and the event shuttles are all free
None of that is new to the festival's format. What's new is what's waiting a few blocks away if you walk down to the water once you've made your way through the vendor tents. The breakwater is fully open, the tower is fully painted, and the portholes that were clouded and broken all last year are repaired. It's the first October since the restoration started where the postcard version of the lighthouse and the actual lighthouse are the same thing.
Why the Tower Still Matters Here
Port Washington has used this lighthouse's silhouette in city logos and business branding for years, long before the restoration made headlines. It's listed on the National and State Registers of Historic Places, and it sits about 20 miles from Milwaukee at the end of what was once one of the busiest coal-receiving harbors on the Great Lakes. None of that history changed this year. What changed is that the physical structure finally caught up to the symbol everyone's been using.
If you've lived here through the scaffolding years, the finished tower isn't a surprise so much as a relief. If you're newer to the neighborhood, this fall is as good a time as any to make the walk and see what the fuss was about.
Whenever the conversation turns from a Saturday on Franklin Street to bigger questions about property in Port Washington, whether that's what a renovation actually adds to resale value or what's changed in a neighborhood you already call home, the team at Realty Officials is glad to talk it through. We've spent enough time on this stretch of the North Shore to know the difference between a landmark under wraps and one that's finally finished.
