Alki Point Light is an active lighthouse on Puget Sound at the southern entrance to Seattle’s Elliott Bay and remains a working navigational aid maintained by the U.S. Coast Guard. Its origins reach back to the 1870s, when Hans Martin Hanson reportedly hung a kerosene lantern on his barn before the United States Lighthouse Board established an official beacon there in 1887 and appointed him keeper. After the government acquired the property in 1910, the present station was completed in 1913 as a 37-foot octagonal brick tower with an attached fog signal building. Modernized in 1962 and automated in 1984, it reflects Seattle’s maritime development from informal shoreline light to permanent federal station.