![]() ![]() Recently, I was asked what prompted this interest. ![]() It wasn’t until my 20s that the fascination clicked. I had visited a few land lights as a child and probably professed myself bored. It seemed a miracle it could stay standing.īefore I started researching my book, I knew nothing, really, about lighthouses. Rocks smashed the base, clunking and groaning. During a storm, the whole tower would quiver as if caught in an electrical current. Inside, it was stuffy and dark, thick with smells of sweat and tobacco and burned bacon, shutters closed in heavy weather, double windows fastened against waves that could chuck salt-spray 85ft into the air, smacking the panes while you’re drinking your tea. Rooms piled one on top of the other, a couple of strides across and that’s it, no way out, nowhere else to go. Before then, three men lived out there on that distant, hostile post for two months at a stretch.Īll they had was each other and the sea. Today, every lighthouse in the UK is automated: the last to go electric was in 1998. Now peer further, deep into the haze, and on a clear day you might pick out the matchstick vertical of the notorious Wolf Rock, eight nautical miles out, so called because of the howling sound the wind makes as it tunnels between the rocks. Stand at Land’s End and you’ll see the Longships – not too far, only a mile away. Bathrooms are available at the nearby Point Vicente Interpretive Center, 31501 Palos Verdes Drive West, in Rancho Palos Verdes.Tower lighthouses exist like mirages on the horizon. Parking is available in an adjacent lot outside the lighthouse fence. Guests can walk the western part of the grounds and the site is handicap accessible, but there is no parking or bathroom on site. (Photo courtesy of Palos Verdes Library District Local History Collection) “For the keeper, it was a really tough situation,” Funk said, “but it was only producing enough power to turn the light, so all of the buildings had to be lit by kerosene lamps until 1933 when they brought out to San Pedro.” The historic Point Vicente Lighthouse in Rancho Palos Verdes as seen in 1936, ten years after it opened. Before that, a gigantic generator helped light the way. ![]() Some buildings that were constructed at the same time as the lighthouse remain standing on the grounds, including the lighthouse keeper’s quarters, a utility building and the foghorn building that is now the museum, according to Paul Funk, president of the Los Serenos de Point Vicente, a nonprofit that has volunteered at the Point Vicente Interpretive Center since it opened in 1984.įull electrical power did not arrive at the lighthouse until 1933, Funk said. Its radio station was decommissioned in May 1980. Four lighthouse keepers were employed at the tower from its opening to its switch to an automated system. The lighthouse became automated in 1971, boasting “a remote electronic aids-to-navigation monitoring system,” according to the USCG website. The Fresnel lens has been on display at the Point Vicente Interpretive Center, a short walk from the lighthouse, since 2019. There is a 1,000 watt bulb inside the light, which emits a beam equivalent to 1.1million candles. “It was sent from Paris to Alaska in 1914 and subsequently sent to Point Vicente in 1925.” “The glass is ground into prisms and weighs in the area of 1,200 pounds,” the 1980 application said. Its Fresnel lens was made in Paris in 1914. “The Lighthouse is not open to the public,” Lisa Sharkey, commander of the Coast Guard Base Los Angeles/Long Beach, said in an email, “and that’s because the Point Vicente Lighthouse serves a current and ongoing mission, which is navigational servitude.”Įarly in its history, according to that application, the tower served “both as a landfall light and a guide to the harbor with its 1.1 million candlepower beam and powerful foghorn.” There seems to be conflicting reasons for why the tours won’t include the lighthouse, with Brahm saying in an email the tower needs renovations - for which there is no timeline - while another Coast Guard official said the facility isn’t open to the public because it’s currently operational. The United States Coast Guard, which manages the federally owned lighthouse, recently allowed the USCG Auxiliary to again offer tours of the grounds on the second Saturday of each month, though the tower itself remains off limits, said USCG spokesperson Richard Brahm. The grounds around the Point Vicente Lighthouse, a guiding light on the Palos Verdes Peninsula since 1926, have reopened for monthly tours for the first time since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |