Clayton Lewis’s tower will be preserved and moved

The iconic tower atop a cottage at Lairds Landing, built by the late artist and fisherman Clayton Lewis, who lived there for over two decades, will be saved and relocated. The Point Reyes National Seashore plans to remove all of Mr. Lewis’s buildings and additions while preserving three 19th-century cottages built by Coast Miwok ranch laborers at the site on Tomales Bay. The park hopes to collaborate with the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria on interpreting the site. But the prospect of Mr. Lewis’s imaginative architecture turning to rubble spurred close friends to action. This week, seashore chief of integrated resource management Gordon White granted a request by Richard Kirschman to remove the tower before the bulldozing begins. “It’s the most iconic part of that strange complex that Clayton called home. I’ve slept there a number of times. It’s really a magical little place,” he said. Mr. Lewis, who moved to Lairds Landing in 1964, painted, sculpted and fished at the site. He also built a foundry and, while living at Lairds with Judy Perlman, one of his former partners and a jeweler, made gold and silver rings, necklaces and bracelets. A bed he built, once inside one of the cottages, is now on display at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and some of the illustrated postcards he sent to his mother in Washington state are featured at a postal museum in Paris. The inside of the tower, which one can reach by climbing a wooden ladder, is covered in graffiti. Mr. Kirschman and Joyce Goldfield, another friend, are brainstorming possible locations for the tower. Wherever it ends up—perhaps at a local park—it might be transformed into a children’s playhouse.