The access road to the Point Fermin Lighthouse in San Pedro, California runs through a heavily utilized urban park maintained by the City of Los Angeles since the 1920s as a green and breezy oasis for inhabitants of the crowded Los Angeles Harbor region. Any weekend visitor who sees the number of joggers, babies in strollers, Frisbee throwers, picnicers and other recreational users the park accommodates on a weekend, under a canopy of ancient-looking Moreton Bay Fig trees, will have a hard time imagining that the Point was once a remote and isolated desert wilderness. That is exactly what it was, however, when the first lighthouse keepers, sisters Mary L. and Ella I Smith, arrived in October 1874. Local legend has it that they departed in 1882 because they found the place "too lonely."
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