Old Point Loma Lighthouse
— the light no fog could reach.
Not only on a wall.
“A small Cape Cod cottage with a lantern on its roof, set on the southern tip of Point Loma. The light first lit on a November evening in 1855, high on the bluff above the Pacific. That elevation turned out to be too high. Fog and low cloud rolled across the promontory most nights, and by 1891 the keeper had moved down the bluff to a new tower closer to the water. The old house stayed. It is a museum now, kept the way it was when a family lived in it and trimmed the wick. Once a year, on the anniversary of the first lighting, the tower opens.
Old Point Loma Lighthouse, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
The Old Point Loma Lighthouse stands on the southern ridge of the Point Loma peninsula in San Diego, California, 422 feet (129 m) above the Pacific. It was begun in 1854 by a contracting crew from the East Coast and lit for the first time on November 15, 1855. The light marked the entrance to San Diego Bay, the first major harbour north of the Mexican border. In 1913 President Woodrow Wilson dedicated the lighthouse and a half-acre of land around it as Cabrillo National Monument, named for the Portuguese-Spanish explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, who first sighted the bay in 1542. The lighthouse sits today inside that park, at the end of Cabrillo Memorial Drive.
The lantern held a third-order Fresnel lens shipped from France and installed more than a year after the building was finished. In clear weather the light carried twenty-five miles out to sea. The trouble was the height. At 422 feet, the lantern often sat above the marine layer that drifts over Point Loma on most summer and autumn nights, so ships approaching from the south often saw nothing where the light should have been. After thirty-six years of this, the Lighthouse Board built a new lower tower close to the tideline. The keeper turned the old light off in March 1891 and walked down the hill.
The lighthouse is part of Cabrillo National Monument, open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Standard admission is $20 per vehicle or $10 per person on foot or by bicycle, valid for seven days, and any America the Beautiful pass covers entry. Visitors walk through the keeper's rooms restored to their 1880s appearance. The tower itself is closed to the public most of the year; the National Park Service opens it once annually on November 15, the anniversary of the first lighting in 1855. Extended summer hours run Friday through Sunday until 8 p.m. The site address is 1800 Cabrillo Memorial Drive, San Diego, California 92106.