The West Passage is one of two entrances to Narragansett Bay, New England's largest estuary, and there are more than 30 islands in the bay. Because it is much shallower than the East Passage, it has very little commercial shipping. On clear days, Block Island can be seen on the horizon; Giovanni da Verrazano, an Italian explorer in the service of the French crown, sighted it in 1524, and in 1614 the Dutch explorer Adrian Block charted it and named it for himself. Point Judith Light, the southernmost landmark on the west side of the bay, stands on a site where three light structures have been built; the first was built in 1810, and the present 51-foot octagonal tower was built in 1856 and fitted with a fourth-order Fresnel lens from Paris that remains in place. To the west is the town of Narragansett, where The Towers are the last remaining portion of a Victorian-period casino built between 1883 and 1886 that burned during the Great Fire of September 12, 1900; the structure was designed by McKim, Mead and White. Also visible is the Whale Rock Light foundation, the remnant of a caisson lighthouse destroyed by the Great Hurricane of 1938. Bonnet Shores Beach Club began in 1928 as part of the Bonnet Shores summer residential community. Up the bay, the University of Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay Campus occupies a 200-acre site that served as a coastal defense site from the Spanish-American War through World War II; it includes the state's only research atomic reactor, the Graduate School of Oceanography, and the homeport for the university's oceanographic research vessel RV Endeavor.