Lights Out : Plans for Point Fermin Lighthouse Do Not Include Longtime Keeper

Julian Jimenez may not have the world’s highest-paying or most glamorous job. But for the past decade, he has enjoyed one of the world’s great fringe benefits.

Jimenez gets to live virtually rent-free in a house by the beach.

Not just any beachside house, either, but the Point Fermin Lighthouse, a two-story Victorian-style home that sits on a bluff in Point Fermin Park in San Pedro--arguably one of the most beautiful coastal locations in Southern California. As a resident park supervisor, Jimenez, 52, lives in the lighthouse full time.

From the windows of the two-bedroom home, or from the captain’s walk on the 50-foot-high light tower that tops the house, Jimenez, a $32,000-a-year maintenance supervisor for the Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks, gets to enjoy the kind of clean sea air and magnificent ocean views that usually only the very wealthy enjoy.

Unfortunately for Jimenez, storm clouds are gathering on his dream-house horizon. New management in the Department of Recreation and Parks has its own ideas about what to do with the Point Fermin Lighthouse. Jimenez is not part of those plans. He has been notified that he has to vacate the premises by July 1.

“(Jimenez) has done a good job,” said David Gonzalez, the new parks department assistant general manager for the Pacific region, who made the decision to oust Jimenez. “But I’d really like to do something else with the lighthouse.”

Gonzalez said that although plans for the lighthouse are not complete, the parks department might want to open the lighthouse to the public, keeping only a portion as a residence. Or the nearby service building may be used as a residence and the lighthouse put to other uses.

But Gonzalez stressed that Point Fermin Park will continue to have 24-hour resident supervision. Some residents and park users had expressed concern about the park’s fate if left without full-time supervision.

“We’re simply going to be moving one person out and another person in,” Gonzalez said. “The very last thing I’d think of doing would be taking security out of the area.”

He added that the new resident will probably be from the recreation section of the department, as opposed to someone from the parks section as is Jimenez.

Living in the Point Fermin Lighthouse has been an experience only a relative handful of people have shared over the lighthouse’s 118-year history.

Jimenez, a bachelor, got the job after his predecessor retired 10 years ago. Since then, he has kept the park in good shape; unlike many city parks, there is hardly any trash and graffiti are quickly covered up.

There are, however, a few drawbacks to life in the lighthouse. Jimenez is on 24-hour, seven-days-a-week call if a maintenance problem arises at the park or at any other park in the department’s Point Fermin district. He has to be on the lookout for anyone who violates the park curfew or other rules, and he is constantly battling the graffiti.

During the storm season, the wind whipping along the bluff can chill to the bone. And in the spring and summer months, the park is swarming with what often seems like millions of screaming children.

And to be accurate, Jimenez does not live in the lighthouse absolutely free. He has to pay his utility costs and a $170 annual fee to the city for living there.

Still, the chance to live in the Point Fermin Lighthouse has been a dream come true.

“It’s been wonderful,” Jimenez said. “I never in my wildest dreams ever thought I’d be able to live by the seashore.”

According to Bill Olesen, 88, of San Pedro, a member of a citizens group that helped restore the lighthouse in the 1970s, the first lightkeeper at Point Fermin Lighthouse was Mary L. Smith, who took the $700-a-year federal job when construction of the lighthouse was completed in 1874. How a woman managed to get the job in those unequal-opportunity times is a mystery, Olesen says, but get the job she did. Smith lived in the lighthouse with her sister, Helen, and she was responsible for maintaining the 2,100-candlepower oil-lamp beacon that was visible 13 miles out to sea.

After eight years, the Smith sisters apparently decided that life at Point Fermin was too lonely, and Mary Smith quit.

Several lightkeepers followed; one of the most long-lasting was a Capt. George Shaw, who held his position for almost two decades around the turn of the century.

In 1927, the city of Los Angeles and the U.S. Commerce Department, which operated the lighthouse, agreed that in return for use of the three-acre parcel as a park, the city would maintain the lighthouse and beacon--which after the changeover from oil lamps to electrical power was merely a case of flipping a switch to illuminate the beacon. The lighthouse was used as a residence for park supervisors and their families.

Shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. military took over the lighthouse and shut it down as part of the coastal blackout program. It was never again used as a beacon.

The lighthouse reverted to city control in 1948. By 1970, it was in disrepair. But the Point Fermin Lighthouse Committee, founded by Olesen and others, helped restored it. In 1972, the lighthouse was entered on the National Register of Historic Places.

Jimenez said his “heart is broken” at the thought of having to move out of his home of 10 years.

“I had hoped to hang on for another five years, until I retire,” the 25-year veteran of the parks department said. “Now I’ll have to find another place to live. I have no idea what rents are going to be like now.”

Gonzalez said that although he sympathizes with Jimenez, “(Jimenez) has had a good deal for the past 10 years. But everything comes to an end.”