In the early 1990s, a man lay in a hospital bed healing from a heart attack, staring at a picture of a lighthouse on the wall of his recovery room.

“The lighthouse drew me in,” Joe Esposito of Staten Island, N.Y., said to his wife later. Eventually, it changed the course of his life and the brightness of the New York Harbor nightscape.

In the past, lighthouses guided ships through treacherous waters or to port. But improved navigational technology has made most lighthouses obsolete, and the Coast Guard has turned them off. But the historic beacons continue to fascinate many people, including Esposito, who have worked to restore and preserve them.

After Esposito returned home from the hospital, he began to build model lighthouses. And although his health remained precarious, he hounded the National Park Service about the dark and neglected Fort Wadsworth lighthouse on the northeastern shore of Staten Island, part of the Gateway National Recreation Area.

From 1903 until 1965, the Fort Wadsworth Light helped guide mariners navigating the Narrows between Staten Island and Brooklyn. The Coast Guard decommissioned the lighthouse in 1965 when the Verrazano Narrows Bridge opened, and it was passed to the Army, then to the Navy and finally, in 1995, to the National Park Service.

Like the beloved children's story of the little red lighthouse under the George Washington Bridge, the forlorn little white lighthouse under the Verrazano Narrows Bridge didn’t seem to be needed or wanted any longer.

“It was a total shambles,” said Bill Crowley, a Staten Island resident. “Rusted out. Rotted out floorboards. There were dead seagulls inside it.”

In 2002, Esposito proposed a plan to restore the historic Fort Wadsworth lighthouse to the National Park Service, and it was approved. Esposito and Steve Salgo, a park ranger, recruited a handful of volunteers who worked on the lighthouse every Sunday for more than two years to bring it back to light. They restored the lighthouse, now solar-powered, for a total cost of $27,000 in materials, contributed by the park service.

The federal government encourages the volunteer preservation of abandoned lighthouses. The National Historic Lighthouse Preservation Act of 2000 recommends the transfer of historic lighthouses at no cost to federal agencies, state and local governments and nonprofit and community development corporations.

About 1,800 lighthouses were built in the United States, according to Wayne Wheeler, founder of the San Francisco-based U.S Lighthouse Society, a group of lighthouse enthusiasts. Lighthouses were the first public works funded in the country, but many have been torn down or destroyed.

About 600 lighthouses in various states of repair stand today, 150 of them still in active use as aids to navigation. A few of the remaining 450 are in private hands, but most belong to the government or have been transferred to nonprofit organizations, which must make them available to the public.

The cost and work involved in restoring lighthouses damaged by years of neglect and vandalism can be great, yet many people are irresistibly drawn to lighthouses and devote themselves to saving them. Lighthouse societies, organizations, foundations, Web sites and tours abound.

“People get very emotional about lighthouses,” said James Hyland, president of the Lighthouse Preservation Society in Newburyport, Mass. He said that lighthouses are frequently found at sites of great natural beauty where land meets sea, and they are often seen spiritually. Hyland also said people respond to the symbolism of a light shining at night that dispels darkness and fears and represents wisdom, love and truth.

“Lighthouses represent an old way of life, a time people look back at wistfully,” Hyland continued. “They are well worth saving for future generations.”

Every lighthouse needs one person to shepherd it through its preservation, Wheeler said. A lighthouse needs a spark plug to be saved and re-lit. For Fort Wadsworth, it was Joe Esposito. For Rose Island, in Rhode Island, it was Charlotte Johnson.

Johnson, a sailor, environmentalist and “lighthouse person,” noticed a dilapidated and vandalized lighthouse on an 18-acre island between Newport and Jamestown in the early 1980s.

The Rose Island Light was turned off when the Newport Bridge was completed in 1969. Johnson and a large group of volunteers restored the lighthouse for about $1 million. The light was re-lit in 1993, and the lighthouse is now an educational center where visitors can learn about conservation, area wildlife and the life of a lighthouse keeper.

Carol House, historical preservationist and president of the Long Island chapter of the U.S. Lighthouse Society, gives tours of the Horton Point Lighthouse, one of the eight lighthouses of Southold Town on the North Fork of eastern Long Island.

The Horton Point Lighthouse, originally commissioned by President Washington in 1790, was deactivated in 1932, but restored and re-lit in 1990 as an aid to navigation through the combined efforts of the Coast Guard, local government and volunteers.

“It’s amazing to me the number of people who come in and identify lighthouses as important to them in their journey through life,” House said.

Esposito found inspiration from lighthouses to create his own legacy. In a re-lighting celebration held by the National Park Service on Sept. 24, the Fort Wadsworth Light once again began casting its small, steady glow over New York Harbor.

But Esposito wasn’t there. He died four months earlier at age 66. At the re-lighting ceremony, his widow, Anna Esposito, surrounded by her family and the other Fort Wadsworth lighthouse volunteers, accepted a plaque from the park service, and she flipped the switch that turned the light back on.

Bill Schmeltz, one of the Fort Wadsworth volunteers, drove 200 miles roundtrip every week to work on the lighthouse. “I’m a little sad,” he said after the re-lighting. "I’d like to do another one.”