Pigeon Point Lighthouse, a towering 19th century white brick structure that is one of the most venerable historic landmarks on Northern California’s coastline, has been closed to the public for more than 20 years because of safety concerns. Now it is finally about to receive a major renovation.
The 115-foot structure, which looms over the scenic coastline between Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz, is the tallest operating lighthouse on the West Coast.
State parks officials have signed a $16 million contract with Sustainable Group — a Moraga contractor run by a former Coast Guard commander — to replace failing bricks and masonry, conduct interior repairs, and to rebuild the black, cast-iron bracings around the top of the lighthouse that are so corroded an engineering report in 2009 described the tower’s upper levels as “in critical condition” and at risk of “catastrophic failure.”
Crews began to prepare the site on Friday. Construction is set to begin on Jan. 2, and will take two years, said Linda Hitchcock, project manager with the California state parks department.
“We are super excited,” she said. “It has taken a lot to get this project going. This lighthouse is a treasure for the state of California, like the Golden Gate Bridge or Hearst Castle. People see it all the time when they drive along Highway 1. People will be able to go inside the building again and see what it looks like once the work is done.”
The subcontractor on the job, ICC Commonwealth, a Buffalo, New York, firm, has restored dozens of iconic lighthouses around the United States, including Cape Hatteras in North Carolina, Cape May in New Jersey and Tybee Island in Georgia.
Pigeon Point, often featured in TV commercials, postcards, and countless tourist photos, was built in 1871 to keep wooden ships from hitting the rocky San Mateo County shoreline.
For years it was a popular attraction, with tour guides dressed as 19th century lightkeepers escorting schoolchildren to the top of the lighthouse. But in 2001 the building was padlocked for safety reasons after large chunks of cast-iron metal bracing fell to the ground. Today, the aging lighthouse is surrounded by a chain-link fence, its white sides streaked with rust and its masonry cracked.
“Pigeon Point Lighthouse is the grand dame of the coast,” said Walter Moore, president of the Peninsula Open Space Trust, a Palo Alto nonprofit that has preserved thousands of acres of open space around the lighthouse over the past 30 years. “It will be great to have her back.”
The lighthouse and the surrounding beaches are visited by an estimated 200,000 people a year, many of them from around the United States and the rest of the world.
“People ask about it all the time,” said Janet Oulton, a longtime volunteer docent at Pigeon Point Light Station State Historic Park. “Every single day they ask ‘Why can’t we go inside? When is it going to be fixed? Why is it taking so long?’ I can’t wait for construction to start. It’s wonderful news.”
In 2005, the Bush administration announced the federal government would transfer the lighthouse to California’s state parks department as part of a public-private restoration partnership that former Interior Secretary Gale Norton heralded as “nothing short of grand.”
But because of complexities in century-old legal and real estate records and bureaucratic inaction, it took six years for the federal government to transfer the land. Then the state parks department, hamstrung by former Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget cuts to the agency, could not afford to restore the structure. A nonprofit group, the California State Parks Foundation, tried to raise money to do the job for years but fell short.
With the once-proud landmark becoming an eyesore, state lawmakers finally approved $9.1 million for the job in 2019. The original plan was to remove the top one-third of the tower, along with its upper decking and roof, repair them in 2020, and then come back later for a second job when more funding was available to rebuild the brickwork, replace windows and other renovations on the bottom of the tower.
But the COVID pandemic, and then wildfires that devastated Big Basin Redwoods State Park and other nearby state parks in August 2020, diverted resources and slowed progress. When California had a huge budget surplus in 2021, Gov. Gavin Newsom and state lawmakers boosted funding for state parks maintenance from $20 million to $185 million statewide, putting the entire Pigeon Point restoration, estimated at $18.9 million, on the list.
The need to provide extremely detailed historic architectural drawings for contractors slowed the job this past year.
“We wanted to be sure the bid package was really accurate,” Hitchcock said. “This is a huge job.”
Scaffolding is expected to go up on the lighthouse by spring, with about a dozen construction workers involved in the project, she said.
The lantern room at the top of the structure and its glass walls will be repaired and resealed. The lighthouse’s original Fresnel lens, built in Paris more than 150 years ago, with 1,008 delicate glass prisms, was removed from the tower in 2011 and is now on display in the Fog Signal Building next to the lighthouse. Once rehabilitation is complete, it will return to the top of the tower, state parks officials say.
Crews also will remove and replace the corroded iron deck around the top of the structure. Under the new plans, the top of the lighthouse will not be removed. Worker also will repair and replace interior ironwork, windows and corroded cast iron at the base of the tower. Layers of old paint will be removed and new paint will be applied to protect the building from the harsh ocean-front elements.
“The worst damage is in the top third of the building,” Hitchcock said. “It’s 150 years old. The side that faces the ocean has the most damage, from 150 years of rain, wind and storms. But once it’s redone it is going to be fabulous.”
