The Lighthouse Too High for the Fog

The lighthouse you are looking at was one of the first lighthouses built on the West Coast after California achieved statehood, though not the very first; the Alcatraz Island light in San Francisco Bay was lit about a year earlier. It was first lit on November fifteenth, eighteen fifty-five, and it had a problem that took thirty-six years to acknowledge.

The lighthouse sits four hundred sixty-two feet above sea level on the summit of Point Loma, which seemed like exactly the right place for a navigational light. Towers belong on heights. The logic was impeccable. The only difficulty was that coastal fog on this stretch of the Pacific does not always reach four hundred sixty-two feet. It often settles below the summit level, a thick grey ceiling between the lighthouse and the ships it was meant to guide. On those nights, which were frequent, the light shone above the fog into empty sky, invisible to any vessel in the shipping lanes below.

The keepers developed workarounds. They discharged shotguns in heavy fog to warn ships away by sound. They maintained a fog bell. They lit signal fires when conditions allowed. These measures worked imperfectly. Congress was eventually persuaded, and funding was appropriated for a new lighthouse at lower elevation on the Point Loma shore.

On March twenty-third, eighteen ninety-one, after thirty-six years of service, the light in this tower was extinguished permanently. The new lighthouse below guided ships into San Diego Bay from that point forward. This lighthouse became a curiosity, then a historic site, and is now preserved within Cabrillo National Monument as what it is: evidence of a logical error that took three and a half decades and several near-shipwrecks to correct.