“If everything fits right and there is no need for any shims or adjustments, that means they’ve measured everything just right and they’ll bolt them in,” says Julie Barrow, special projects coordinator for California State Parks.

Full scaffolding encased the tower during the hand scraping of multiple layers of lead paint and the application of new coatings.
Photo courtesy of California State Parks

Of course, the brackets are not the originals, as not many remained intact after 150 years of coastal conditions. After the best surviving pieces were extracted, they were sent off to Robinson Iron’s foundry in Alabama where they were 3D scanned to create molds. Replacements were then cast out of marine-grade stainless steel.

“You’re putting new back to old,” says Beau Payne, division manager of the Historic Preservation Division at ICC Commonwealth and project manager at Pigeon Point. “Some things might not line up. They might have to be modified to fit back in the way the new design is calling for. It’s a challenge in itself when you’re putting all new [material back on], but it’s an even bigger challenge putting new stuff back to old stuff and making everything jibe.”

The iron stairs were in good condition, requiring minor rust removal and fresh paint.
Photo courtesy of California State Parks

Pigeon Point’s Origins

Before the 1850s, there was very little commercial traffic north of Monterey, which was then the capital of Alta California. That quickly changed with the Gold Rush. At the time, the most practical way to get to California was by sea.

“Instead of maybe 10 ships a year, there were suddenly 10 or 12 ships a month—a significant increase,” Barrow says. “And shipwrecks started happening as early as 1853.”

That’s when the first major one happened. A ship out of Boston on her maiden voyage had traveled all the way around Cape Horn and ran aground off the point. While everyone survived, the ship and cargo did not. That ship was called the Carrier Pigeon, and that’s how Pigeon Point earned its name, Barrow says.

“It’s a challenge in itself when you’re putting all new [material back on], but it’s an even bigger challenge putting new stuff back to old stuff and making everything jibe.”
—Beau Payne, Division Manager, ICC Commonwealth

But a lighthouse wouldn’t rise on the point for another 20 years. The federal government built about 10 stations on the West Coast in 1853 and 1854, then redirected its resources toward the Civil War. In the interim, three more major wrecks off Pigeon Point killed around 50 people. Local pressure grew, so the government authorized a second wave of West Coast lighthouses around 1870. Pigeon Point’s tower was first lit on Nov. 15, 1872.

Most California lighthouses sit on high bluffs and are fairly modest, with a keeper’s house and a light poking through the roof. Only three on the West Coast were built to a larger scale, Barrow says, and all three came off the same set of drawings: Pigeon Point; Point Arena, north of San Francisco; and Yaquina Head in Oregon. Point Arena was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and rebuilt in reinforced concrete. Yaquina Head, shorter at 93 ft, has seen “a fair amount of work on its cast iron,” but not to the extent of Pigeon Point, Barrow says. At 115 ft, Pigeon Point is still among the tallest lighthouses in the country.

Those 1870s drawings survived too, and they turned out to matter, says Loring Wyllie, senior principal with Degenkolb Engineers, the state’s engineer-of-record. Wyllie, who has spent his career working on historic structures, says complete documentation of that quality is rare.

“I describe it like a Swiss watch, because every little piece of the construction was there,” he says. “You sort of had to figure out how to put them together a bit, but the drawings were quite thorough, and they were really a great help in trying to put everything back together.”

Hand drilling old brickwork at the same location from which pieces of cast iron and brick fell from the top of the lighthouse in 2001.
Photo courtesy of California State Parks

In Need of Repair

Pigeon Point has long been a tourist destination thanks in part to its location right alongside Highway 1. Before the pandemic, there were about 200,000 visitors a year.

But the restoration project dates back to December 2001, when two large sections of cast iron and brick broke free from the upper tower and fell to the ground. The U.S. Coast Guard, which owned the station at the time, closed public access immediately.

That failed element was a belt course: a cast iron ring circling the tower, serving both structural and decorative functions. As Barrow explains to visitors, the result of that belt course failing would be similar to standing a bundle of unsharpened pencils vertically with a rubber band around them, then taking the band away.

“It’s not just an RFI and then a response. For the really hard stuff, it’s collaborative, and it has to be to get a good solution for this project.”
—Karen Benouar, Senior Architect, California Dept. of Parks and Recreation

A substantial load sits above that ring too. It’s where the watch and lantern rooms are located, home to a 1st-order Fresnel lens, its pedestal and chariot wheels, which weigh around 4 tons combined by Barrow’s estimate. The lens itself is 16 ft tall and 6 ft in diameter, weighing 2,000 lb.

But the Coast Guard didn’t want to pay for the repair, despite the lighthouse remaining an official navigation aid.

“I’m a retired Coast Guard guy. I’ve been to just about every lighthouse on the West Coast at some point in my career, doing condition assessments, because the Coast Guard didn’t have enough money to maintain these lighthouses,” explains Roger Wykle, CEO at Sustainable Group. “We were always looking for state parks or a nonprofit, somebody to take them over, just to save them. The maintenance costs are pretty high.”

California State Parks, which had operated the station as a park under a cooperative agreement since 1980, bid to take it over. That bid was accepted in 2005, and title transferred in 2011. The Fresnel lens came down that November, two months after the signing, and has been on display in the fog signal building ever since.

A decade of stabilization work, engineering studies, historic reports and fundraising followed, much of it through nonprofit partners such as the California State Parks Foundation and the Coastside State Parks Association. Degenkolb Engineers has been involved since 2002.

“I went out and we looked at it, and of course we agreed that the area should be roped off because there were probably other things about to fall,” Wyllie recalls.

Degenkolb and Architectural Resources Group completed restoration drawings around 2017. By then the estimate had climbed toward $15 million to $16 million, and the documents sat on a shelf. The state allocated roughly $9.5 million in 2019, which was only enough for the upper tower. Then the pandemic stalled the bid package. A second allocation of about $9.5 million followed in 2021, bringing the total to nearly $19 million and funding the entire tower in one contract.

Since Pigeon Point is a national and state historic site, procurement could not follow low-bid rules. State Parks California prequalified a short list of contractors experienced in historic restoration, solicited bids from that list and interviewed the teams. The winning team was Sustainable Group, a California general contractor, and ICC Commonwealth, formerly International Chimney Corp., which moved into preservation in the 1980s after recognizing that a chimney stack and a lighthouse are close cousins structurally. Construction began in early 2024.

ICC Commonwealth’s team took this pre-restoration shot of the lighthouse during a preconstruction visit in 2023.
Photo courtesy of ICC Commonwealth

Problems Spotted

While the original contract simply called for repairing the metal at the top of the tower, the renovation has gone much like most do—once pieces start coming off, the problems keep multiplying.

Before all that, ICC suggested a probing phase, cutting into the masonry at the bracket, gallery and lantern levels to determine if the team’s design would actually work.

“If we’re really trying to preserve this thing for 150 more years, the best foot forward is ultimately to replace these things,” Payne says.

The design team tried to preserve as much of the original tower as possible. A new structural system would carry the deck loads while the historic brackets stayed in place as architectural elements.

“Of just the items we had designed, over half got completely redesigned.”
—Enrico Alvaro, Senior Engineer, Degenkolb Engineers

Realizing the full extent of the corrosion was quite another thing. Cast iron embedded in masonry for 150 years would almost certainly be corroded, Wykle notes. While the initial scope covered repairing some brackets, at least half were visibly cracked and all were expected to need replacement once the walls opened—and “sure enough, that happened,” Wykle says.

The lower belt courses turned out to be in worse condition. Since the brick beneath them had absorbed so much water in places, it reverted to something closer to mud. And the belt courses could not be repaired in sections because the original builders bolted each ring together entirely before laying any masonry around it.

“We couldn’t just cut out a section and put a section back because there’d be no way to fix it to the rest of the belt course,” Payne explains. Both lower belt courses were ultimately replaced in 316 stainless steel.

Karen Benouar, senior architect for the California Dept. of Parks and Recreation, says the cost pressure on the project has come almost entirely from that discovery process rather than from material escalation. Each unforeseen condition ran through the same loop—the contractor developed options, the design team and a state parks project historian weighed them against historic standards and the state made the call.

“It’s not just an RFI and then a response,” Benouar says. “For the really hard stuff, it’s collaborative, and it has to be to get a good solution for this project.”

The redesign effort has been substantial across the entire project. “Of just the items we had designed, more than half got completely redesigned,” says Enrico Alvaro, a senior engineer at Degenkolb. “And definitely over half of the items needed to be revisited in construction.”

The first marine-grade stainless-steel belt course that was completed on the Pigeon Point restoration.
Photo courtesy of California State Parks

Better Support

Since the original gallery brackets were embedded in the masonry—which is why they failed—the team wanted to avoid the same situation with iron inside brick. New brackets do the same structural job from the outside. “It’ll still look exactly the same, but they’re no longer embedded in that wet, moist, salt-air environment,” Wykle says.

Each bracket is bolted through a bond beam and welded at the base. Careful demolition then makes room for them, proceeding in reverse order of how the tower was built—remove a bracket, take out only the brick immediately around it, leave load-bearing masonry on either side, then move on to the next one.

The original 2017 design called for I-beams cantilevering out between the brackets to carry the gallery deck, relieving the brackets of their structural role. Putting the deck load back on the brackets, Payne notes, returns the top of the lighthouse closer to its historic appearance.

“In each one of these cases, we’d have a big discussion and make a decision, trying to preserve not the historic fabric so much, but the historic appearance,” Wyllie says.

“New brick is much harder, and you don’t want new hard brick next to old brick in a seismic event.”
—Roger Wykle, CEO, Sustainable Group

That sentiment has continued throughout the renovation. Benouar frames it as a durability question: “What would be the smartest choice in material and design to last another 150 years? While maintaining the historic character and integrity of the lighthouse, what can we put in that may serve the building better?”

Almost all exterior cast iron has been replaced with marine-grade stainless, then coated black. “Once it’s coated, you cannot tell the difference between them,” Payne says. “A lot of the elements are cast stainless, so it really keeps the visual of being a cast iron element, but it’s really cast 316 stainless steel.”

Cast stainless steel was new to the design team, but guidance from craftspeople eased the process, Alvaro says. Meanwhile, stainless steel rebar for some of the concrete elements created sourcing headaches since it’s mostly used for transportation projects, not buildings.

Some decorative cornice elements were recreated in glass fiber reinforced polymer (GFRP), a lighter alternative to cast iron, adds Carolyn Geyer, an architect with Page & Turnbull, which is handling construction administration. Other components that were initially planned to be GFRP were switched to stainless steel once the extent of brick deterioration at the base became clear.

Since elastomeric coatings applied to many Coast Guard-era lighthouses trap moisture inside masonry with no other way to dry, Pigeon Point received mineral coatings that let vapor move through the wall, Payne says.

Of course, being located in California, seismic reinforcement was critical. Three concentric concrete bond beams at the top of the tower, reinforced with stainless rebar, replaced unreinforced masonry as the system holding the upper structure together and carrying load down.

However, installing these bond beams required exacting precision. The rebar had to be bent to a precise radius, placed, tied and welded, then inspected before any concrete was placed.

“I said make sure they inspect this because we do not want to tear this concrete back out,” Wykle recalls. “And we were very careful with the concrete mix.”

Only about 0.75 cu yd of concrete was used for the bottom bond beam, and about 1 cu yd for each of the middle and top beams. Crews pumped concrete up to each location and applied vibration to eliminate voids.

Shoring took a lot of thought as well to make “sure everything stayed put above us so we could pour those ring beams down below,” Payne says.

As for the masonry, the replacement brick had to match the original as much as possible. “New brick is much harder, and you don’t want new hard brick next to old brick in a seismic event,” Wykle says. “The new brick just beats the old brick and creates bigger cracks, and pretty soon the structure fails.”

The first candidate, sourced locally, matched the color, but many had to be cut in order to fit. Bricklayers eventually realized that it was costing too much time, so the team began looking for another solution. Stiles & Hart, a Massachusetts manufacturer that has produced brick since 1893, was able to match the dimensions exactly. The color was slightly off, but the brick would be coated after installation. “In this situation, size is the most critical part of putting the brick back,” Payne says.

This new brick is denser than the original and resists water absorption, Barrow says, unlike the original that wicks and holds moisture.

Roughly three truckloads of the new brick were shipped across the country. Barrow estimates about 20,000 of the tower’s roughly 500,000 bricks will be replaced by the time work is complete.

Old masonry in the service room walls also had to be replaced as crews made their way through each portion of the lighthouse.
Photo courtesy of California State Parks

Let There be Light

Treating corrosion in situ 115 ft in the air on a cliff above the Pacific Ocean is difficult, regardless of how much of it you find, Geyer says.

“If we ever get something like this again, the best way to go about it is to take everything right off,” Payne adds. “Build a temporary roof over the column, take the lantern right off, take everything to a controlled environment. You can scan everything, figure out what should be replaced and what should be kept.”

Alvaro agrees, adding that disassembling as much as possible and repairing elements in a shop would be ideal. “Don’t try to do it in place if you can avoid it,” he says.

Regardless of the work done on this project, maintenance will be vital to preserving this historic landmark. “There are a lot of lighthouses that don’t have caretakers like Pigeon Point does, and 5–10 years later, they’re starting to rust again,” Payne points out. “Maintenance is the No. 1 thing.”

Robinson Iron is scheduled to be back on site this fall to install the brackets, deck and railings. Barrow puts the work at around 75% complete as of July, with completion expected by spring 2027.

The final piece will be to return the Fresnel lens to the tower, which is scheduled for October. It will be disassembled into 48 numbered glass panels, each carried up the tower and then reassembled in sequence, “kind of like a paint-by-numbers jigsaw,” Barrow says.

While Pigeon Point’s original beacon won’t return to nightly service—the Coast Guard plans to mount an automated beacon on the outer balcony—the lens will still be functional.

Before the tower closed, California State Parks lit the lens once a year on the station’s November anniversary. At 6 p.m., the Fresnel lens would turn on, throwing 24 spokes of light into the fog for about 5 to 10 minutes, then start a slow rotation until 8 p.m. The event used to cause thousands of cars to stop and watch along Highway 1.

“We hope to be able to do that again,” Barrow says.