Santa Monica Pier’s Pacific Wheel Lights Up for Thanksgiving

Pacific Park to Display 90-Foot Tall Turkey on Its Ferris Wheel For Thanksgiving

If you visit the beach in Santa Monica during Thanksgiving week, you’ll be astonished to see a very tall turkey spinning across the 90ft face of the Pacific Wheel. The Ferris wheel’s 174K LEDs will be all dressed up for Thanksgiving with a giant turkey, a brown, orange, and red color palette, and other seasonal designs. The seasonal light program will repeat nightly all week long.

This special lighting event will begin on Monday, November 25^th and run through Thursday, November 28th. The lights can be seen from dusk until 11:30 PM each evening. Pacific Park has extended hours on Thanksgiving Day and is scheduled to be open from 11AM-9PM, so you can bring your friends and family to the Pier and enjoy the rides before or after you enjoy your holiday meal. If you are unable to make it out to the Santa Monica Pier this week, you can always view the Wheel’s light programs on our live-streaming web cams.

Pacific Park regularly programs the Ferris wheel to display seasonal programing and themed light designs for holidays and special occasions. The Pacific Wheel’s state-of-the-art lighting package was installed in 2016 and can display over 1.6 million different colors and animate patterns and icons in 24 frames per second. The energy efficient LEDs on the face of the Ferris wheel are powered by solar arrays inside Pacific Park. The light programs are curated and designed by Pacific Park staff. Each design is manually animated; some designs can take hours of programming. The aim is to provide fun, high-energy, and sometimes whimsical designs to entertain guests on the Santa Monica Pier and surrounding beaches.

The Ferris wheel’s light programs can be seen nightly lighting the waters around the Santa Monica Pier and are regularly featured in news broadcasts across the country. Pacific Park accepts special lighting requests from the public as part of a sponsorship arrangement with the Park. Because of the large volume of these requests, not all submissions can be met, and the Park no longer offers pro bono lighting requests. To learn more about these and other opportunities to partner with Pacific Park, please visit pacpark.com/sponsorships.