Point Loma Association hopes to brighten Rosecrans Street with Village Anchor Lights
Part of Point Loma will get a little brighter if the Point Loma Association is able to flip the switch on its Village Anchor Lights project.
The project involves installing a canopy of lights across two blocks of Rosecrans Street between Talbot and Cañon streets in the Roseville section. The lights would be up year-round to add to the welcoming, village feel that proponents are hoping for.
Mike McCurdy, chairman of the Point Loma Association, supports the project in part because he feels Point Loma is lacking in providing residents and visitors a gateway to the neighborhood.
“Usually you have a gateway sign, like in Hillcrest and in North Park, or lights,” he said. “We’re trying to showcase or create more of a village feel of Point Loma. It’s two blocks of full-blown custom street lights. There are posts that go up and the lights that go across. They stay there indefinitely.”
According to the Point Loma Association’s website, the name Village Anchor Lights “pays tribute to Point Loma’s fishing and sailing heritage. An anchor light is a 32-point light visible from at least two miles away, shown at night near the bow and not more than 20 feet above the deck of a vessel lying at anchor.”
Point Loma Association board member JT Barr has been spearheading the lighting project, mostly due to his background as a landscape architect, which gives him insight into a project of this scope. Barr said the association’s Projects Committee is responsible for the concept and implementation.
“The Projects Committee really focuses on strategic interventions that are larger in scale that can positively benefit the community of Point Loma,” Barr said. “Mike [McCurdy] and I had discussed it for a number of years, but ultimately it was the Projects Committee, five individuals, who identified this as a really unique opportunity. And we took that to the larger Point Loma Association board and the board was fully supportive of it.”
Though the idea of installing lights in Roseville had been floated for years, the Projects Committee made it a priority in 2018. Since then, the project has been cycling through the San Diego Development Services Department.
“Really, it’s just a matter of a process of design and approvals,” Barr said. “We developed the initial concept, the grand vision or idea. And from that point, we then assembled a team of experts — structural engineers, civil engineers and electrical engineers — who could prepare a series of drawings that would allow the project to be built. Once those drawings were developed, we [must get a permit] ... through the city of San Diego, and that’s the phase we’re in right now. We’re in our second cycle of review.”
Barr hopes that after this round, the association will be given the green light.
The goal is for the project to be fully built by the end of 2021. The estimated $450,000 budget is funded by the Point Loma Association, fundraising efforts and several grants from the county and city.
“The response to it has been overwhelmingly happy ... there’s just sheer excitement,” McCurdy said.
He and Barr said they hope to implement future beautification projects in Point Loma.
“We’d love to do more beyond this — we just want to get this one done first,” McCurdy said. “But very positive, for sure.”
The Point Loma Association is a nonprofit community service and advocacy organization. For more information about it and the Village Anchor Lights project, visit pointloma.org.
