Watch a short documentary on the Coney Island lighthouse

There’s something appealing about having a job being a lighthouse keeper. You get to live on the beach, you don’t have irritating co-workers and you get to make sure that sailors don’t crash on the rocks and meet their watery doom. Sadly, lighthouses are automated these days, but because Coney Island is great, it was home to the last civilian-operated lighthouse in the country. And PBS made a short documentary about it. You’ve got four minutes to kill to learn something, check it out!

The documentary tells the short story of Frank Schubert, who got the job as a lighthouse keeper after serving in World War II, and kept it until the lighthouse was automated in 1989. The lighthouse, which has been up since 1890, is unfortunately behind the gates of Sea Gate, so Charles Denson’s (of the Coney Island History Project) idea to make it a museum and more accessible will probably never happen. And while you can’t be a lighthouse keeper in Coney Island anymore, you can still do some good work there.