What stays of San Francisco’s loneliest spot, Mile Rocks
When the fog clears, the view across the bay from San Francisco’s secluded Mile Rock Beach is breathtaking. Boats pass under the bridge as the waves thunder against the protruding rock formations. Pelicans soar and sea lions frolic in the sand while the foghorn howls into the wide sky.
But between the small beach and the distant headlands, a confusing structure breaks through the horizon.
Today, Mile Rocks is a rusted helipad, for decades an iconic lighthouse for wedding cakes and, before that, the scene of a tragedy that claimed more than 100 lives.
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The SS city of Rio de Janeiro arrived off the coast of San Francisco on February 21, 1901. The steamer mainly carried immigrants and cargo from China and Japan. On that day, 210 passengers and crew members were on board, who made their last leg to San Francisco after weeks at sea. As the fog cleared it was decided to anchor near the Cliff House and wait for the night.
The next morning the clouds appeared to be breaking up and Captain William Ward drew anchor and set sail for the dock. But the fog quickly closed again. At 5:30 a.m., while the passengers were asleep, the Rio’s hull was torn from the hidden rocks off the coast of Lands End.
Panic spread in the ship almost as quickly as the holds were flooded. Some survivors reported that a language barrier between the US officers and Chinese seafarers prevented lifeboats from leaving.
The SS city of Rio de Janeiro, built in 1878 by John Roach & Son in Chester, Pennsylvania, regularly carried passengers and cargo between Asia and San Francisco. Photo taken in Nagasaki, Japan, 1894.
Handing Out / Courtesy of San Francisco Maritime
In just eight minutes the ship was gone, its iron hull buckled on the seabed. The passengers, most of them immigrants only hours away from a new life in America, woke up trapped in their bunks. One hundred and twenty-eight didn’t come out alive. Some passengers fled their rooms and clung to floating wreckage in the cold water, and 82 lives were saved with the help of Italian fishermen hauling in their early morning catches nearby.
Captain Ward went down with the ship. His remains, identified by a watch chain containing a Chinese silver coin, were found on a Marin beach a year after the disaster.
Although the sinking of the Rio was one of dozen who met the same fate when they entered the Golden Gate, it was the most tragic and caused the greatest outrage in San Francisco. Captain Ward and Pilot Frederick Jordan, who survived, were both found guilty of gross negligence in choosing to drive through the fog that morning.
Treasure hunters flocked to Baker Beach and Lands End after rumors spread that the ship’s cargo contained gold and silver. This turned out to be wrong as only wreckage, tin and human remains washed ashore. The San Francisco Call accused the officers on watch at Fort Point of ignoring emergency whistles which they claim were never heard. The newspaper published extensive reports for days on the tragedy, which it described as “the horror of last Friday that shook the whole world”.
The San Francisco Examiner told “exciting rescue stories with crystal clear escapes” and published photos of the dead washed up on the quay.
The San Francisco Examiner, February 23, 1901.
San Francisco Examiner
Shortly after the disaster, Congress approved funding to build a lighthouse on Mile Rocks.
Building a three-story structure on one of the coast’s most treacherous and tiny rocks was no easy task, but five years later the construction of the three-tier cylindrical tower with balcony and lantern was completed.
“Built of concrete and steel, planned to use every inch of tooth and rock that protrudes from the bottom of the bay and to offer an impregnable front to the storms …” wrote the call.
The operation of the lighthouse was a four-man, full-time enterprise. A crew of four “Wickies” lived there for three weeks before returning to shore. Though just yards from San Francisco, the operation was so cut off that the government classified it as an “isolated station,” a designation usually reserved for outposts far away. The quarters were so close that the lighthouse was a designated “deer” station, which meant that women were not allowed to climb the ladder.
The Wickies spent their days and nights servicing the lights with 50,000 candles and the fog horn that activated when visibility fell below 5 miles. The waves and currents were so dangerous that mail and groceries could only be delivered via hoists from the weekly Navy ship that arrived from Fort Point. A 30-foot ladder connected to a board served as an entry point when the Wickies switched. The crew cooked a hot meal every day, and whoever took the last cup from the 4-gallon Eternal Coffee Pot had to make the next serving.
The upside of the job was that after 22 days on the rock, the guardsmen were allowed 8 days ashore in San Francisco, longer than any other post in the bay, but the work was arduous.
“It’s a constant cycle of scraping, guiding red, painting and scraping again,” one of the last guardsmen from Mile Rocks told the Examiner in 1963, lonely. “
“Sometimes the lights on the bank seem a bit distant, but you get used to them,” said another officer, Robert Schoener. “Every now and then the waves shake the tower and you wonder if you’re still here in the morning. But you always are. “
The Mile Rocks lighthouse, around 1950.
Keystone / Getty Images
The lighthouse was both dangerous and expensive, and inevitably in 1966, after 60 years of successful service with no more wrecks to be seen around the rocks, the station was inevitably automated via a submarine cable to Baker Beach. The upper two floors and the lantern room have been removed and replaced with a helipad to allow the Coast Guard to perform access and maintenance as they do today. The loss of the historic lighthouse was not welcomed by everyone, but the engineers sold the new station as “an unusual but aesthetically satisfactory structure”.
As for the SS city of Rio de Janeiro, despite countless explorers and divers who claimed to have found the wreck, it took 113 years to find the remains of the ship. In 2014, marine researchers found and identified San Francisco’s most famous shipwreck using a sonar-equipped submersible. The broken, sediment-covered hull was found half a mile offshore below Mile Rocks at a depth of 287 feet, the sunken remains of an eight-minute disaster over a century ago.
If you look out today, the rusted white structure fits nicely into the choppy horizon. Occasionally, Coast Guard helicopters still land on site, but most of the time, seagulls call the 50-foot-diameter platform home and stand in the ocean spray that was once tragedy.
The small beach with the best views of the structure is a few sandy steps from the Lands End Trail. In the 1950s, one guardsman remembered turning his light on in the lighthouse on lonely evenings to the same bay where his wife, who was walking her dog, waved back to say goodnight.
