JP Pelletier, site superintendent for the Pigeon Point Lighthouse restoration project, shows off where brick and iron is being assessed near the top of the 115-foot-tall landmark on the San Mateo County coast, Thursday, Aug. 1, 2024. (Karl Mondon/ Bay Area News Group)
The winds howled and the waves crashed 100 feet below as J.P. Pelletier, a burly union ironworker from Buffalo, New York, inched his way out onto dizzying scaffolding near the top of Pigeon Point Lighthouse, a historic brick landmark that has stood between Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz for 153 years.
“You can see the decay on these things,” he said, pointing to ornate black metal first installed when Ulysses S. Grant was president. “This bracket is cracked all the way through. There’s corrosion here, and here and here. These are in pretty bad shape.”
Work to restore the lighthouse — a towering 115-foot-tall brick structure built in 1871 that has been beloved by millions of visitors for generations, but which was closed to the public in 2001 after it fell badly into disrepair — is moving forward in earnest this summer.
Under a $16 million project overseen by California’s state parks department, scaffolding went up a few months ago. Construction workers have begun methodically probing, testing and measuring the structure, which shares the title as tallest lighthouse on the West Coast with Point Arena Lighthouse in Mendocino County.
“We are starting at the top and working our way down,” said Roger Wykle, a former Coast Guard commander who is CEO of the Sustainable Group, a Moraga-based firm that was awarded the contract late last year. “Be patient with us. Work is being done. It is going to be worth it in the end.”
The job’s subcontractor, ICC Commonwealth, is a company based in Buffalo that has restored more than 100 lighthouses around the United States, including Cape Hatteras in North Carolina, Cape May in New Jersey and Tybee Island in Georgia. At Pigeon Point, its crew has a long to-do list.
Workers plan to replace failing bricks and masonry, repair the glass walls and railings in the lantern room, conduct interior repairs, and rebuild the black cast-iron braces around the top of the lighthouse that are so corroded an engineering report in 2009 described the tower’s upper levels as at risk of “catastrophic failure.”
Since they began the serious work in June, workers have been removing lead paint by hand, which in some places is 12 coats thick. They have pulled up the floors in the old wooden lightkeeper’s residence adjacent to the tower to seismically retrofit the building, from its walls and the chimneys.
They are identifying which of the 500,000 bricks in the lighthouse need replacing, which ancient mortar must be dug out, which ironwork is so badly rusted away that it must be duplicated with new stainless steel pieces.
A major part of the job will be to construct three reinforced concrete rings in the walls of the lighthouse to surround and strengthen the aging tower like belts and protect it from earthquakes.
“The iron is in the worst shape on the side that faces the ocean,” Pelletier said. “One hundred and fifty years of anything sitting in the marine environment, it just deteriorates.”
Work is scheduled to be completed in September 2025, said Julie Barrow, special projects coordinator for state parks.
“Every day, people ask us ‘What’s going on here?’ ‘Can we go inside?’ and ‘When will it be done?'” Barrow said.
For years, the lighthouse was a popular attraction, with tours taking schoolchildren up the 136 winding black iron stairs and docents dressed as 19th-century lightkeepers telling stories of California’s seafaring history. But after a large chunk of iron bracing fell off in 2001, state parks closed the building to the public.
Lighthouses are no longer critical for ship navigation. The tower had an automated Coast Guard beacon which was removed for construction but will be put back up.
Barrow said the decision hasn’t been made yet whether to allow the public back in when the work is finished. She said that there are considerations, including the Americans with Disabilities Act, that the state parks officials are still studying.
For many advocates, the project is a key part of preserving one of Northern California’s most stunning coastal treasures.
“This is an icon of the California coast,” said Randy Widera, programs director for the California State Parks Foundation, a nonprofit group that raised $3.5 million a decade ago to help fund emergency repairs.
“The lighthouse has incredible maritime history. It’s part of California’s sense of place. Everybody stops here when they are driving down the coast, from locals to people visiting from all over the world.”
For decades, the lighthouse was owned by the Coast Guard. Before that, lighthouses were a critical part of early California’s history.
“Until the Transcontinental Railroad was completed, the main way to get here from the East Coast was by sea,” Barrow said. “And most days you couldn’t see the coast because of the fog. Lighthouses were essential to help tell ship’s captains where they were.”
Pigeon Point is named for the Carrier Pigeon, a 175-foot-long wooden clipper ship that wrecked on the rocks along the San Mateo County coast in 1853 while en route from Boston to San Francisco.
The lighthouse had a few minor renovations in the 1960s, 1970s and early 1990s.
But then it endured more than 20 years of neglect.
In 2005, the Bush administration announced the federal government would transfer it to California’s state parks department as part of a public-private partnership that former Interior Secretary Gale Norton heralded as “nothing short of grand.”
But because of complexities in old real estate records and bureaucratic inaction, it took six years to transfer to state ownership. Then the State Parks Department, hamstrung by former Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget cuts, could not afford to fully restore the structure.
When California’s budget reached a big surplus in 2021, Gov. Gavin Newsom and state lawmakers provided $18.9 million to fund the entire Pigeon Point restoration project.
On a recent day this week, visitors said they were happy to see work finally underway.
“It’s phenomenal out here,” said Stephanie Powell, visiting from San Diego with her mother, Laura. “The coast and the cove are beautiful, and the lighthouse is a real draw.”
Both said they hoped state parks leaders allow the public back in when the job is finished.
“I hope they let people back up to the top,” Laura Powell said. “I’ve been through lighthouses on the East Coast and in San Diego. The perspective at the top is so different than from the ground.”
