Point Fermin Light, Wooden lighthouse in San Pedro, Los Angeles, United States.
Point Fermin Light is a wooden lighthouse in the San Pedro neighborhood of Los Angeles, built from California redwood and standing about 30 feet (9 meters) tall. It sits inside a small coastal park overlooking the Pacific and is one of the few surviving wooden lighthouses on the West Coast.
Built in 1874 from California redwood to a design by Paul J. Pelz, the lighthouse was extinguished in 1941 after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, for fear it would guide enemy planes and ships. The original fourth-order Fresnel lens was removed in 1942. Saved from demolition in 1972 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places, it was refurbished in 1974 with a new lantern room, gallery and wood replica lantern.
The lighthouse appears in several television productions: from 1977 to 1978 it stood in for the fictional Foundation for Oceanic Research headquarters in Man from Atlantis, and it later featured in Hart to Hart (1979), Amazing Stories (1986), Murder, She Wrote (1988) and two episodes of MacGyver. It also inspired the El Gordo Lighthouse in the 2013 video game Grand Theft Auto V.
The lighthouse is located inside Point Fermin Park in San Pedro, and it is easy to reach by car or on foot from the surrounding neighborhood. Guided tours of the interior run on a regular basis, but group sizes are limited so arriving early is a good idea.
The original fourth-order Fresnel lens was removed in 1942 and went missing for decades. It was later found and identified, and on November 13, 2006, it was returned to a display in the restored lighthouse museum from a real estate office in Malibu, California, where it had been kept.
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