[2][3][4] It was made notable by the 1942 children's book The Little Red Lighthouse and The Great Gray Bridge, written by Hildegarde Swift and illustrated by Lynd Ward.

The lighthouse stands on Jeffrey's Hook, a small point of land that supports the base of the eastern pier of the bridge, which connects Washington Heights in Manhattan to Fort Lee, New Jersey.

[5] A 10 candle-power light was added to the pole in 1889 to help alert the increasing river traffic to the spit of land at night.

[5] It was reconstructed at its current location in 1921 by the United States Lighthouse Board as part of a project to improve Hudson River navigational aids, and originally had a battery-powered lamp and a fog bell.

[6] When George Washington Bridge was completed in 1931,[7] the lighthouse navigational light was considered obsolete,[8] so the Coast Guard decommissioned it, and put it out in 1948, with the intention of auctioning it off.

There is also a very obscure pedestrian underpass at Riverside Drive parallel to 177th Street, just south of the George Washington Bridge.