Long Beach Harbor and Light Tower

The Port of Long Beach is located adjacent to the Port of Los Angeles, and if you combine the number of cargo containers shipped through the two ports, they rank as the third busiest container cargo port in the world after Hong Kong and Singapore.
The Port of Long Beach is the second busiest container seaport in the U.S., bested only by Los Angeles. Long Beach also comes in second after Los Angeles in another category, its lighthouse. Long Beach Harbor Lighthouse surely must win the award for California's ugliest lighthouse. The three-story, monolithic structure rests on a base of six columns and was built of concrete to withstand earthquakes and seismic tidal waves.

When completed in 1949 at a cost of roughly $200,000, the lighthouse was hailed as the world's most modern and a forerunner of what was to come in the way of automated aids to navigation. The lighthouse was originally equipped with a rotating airway beacon, mounted on its roof, and was controlled by an astronomical clock that would compute the sunset and sunrise times each day and turn the light on and off accordingly. To avoid the possibility that the beacon could concentrate the sun's rays and melt its lamps, the light rotated continuously.