The Guns at Fort Tilden

by David Moore

Off a raw stretch of beach in the Rockaways, hidden in thick wilderness, stands a pair of long-abandoned artillery batteries. The big-gun emplacements were first sited there in 1917, in the former Army base at Fort Tilden, to guard New York Harbor. 

Since the decommissioning of the base in 1974 it’s been part of the Gateway National Recreation Area; a nature preserve close to and yet removed from New York City, and a refuge cherished by regulars. For 20 summers, I’ve ducked down the overgrown paths to pay a visit to these eerie, graffiti-covered bunkers. Many visitors arrive by bike, as I do, skittering off the urban highways of Brooklyn, over the narrow path astride the Marine Parkway Bridge, and locking up at the very end of the shore road.

The beach at Fort Tilden is a mile or so from the busy Jacob Riis Park, with its food trucks and vast expanses of parking lots. Here, there’s just a long stretch of undulating sand dotted with bodies on beach blankets, a few different types of seabirds, including the endangered piping plover, and the occasional small burrowing crab. This rough beach is one of my favorite places; I used often to come with friends who’ve left the city now. We’d swim out to the sandbar, throw a frisbee, behold the ghostly fort, and get in the waves again. 

I get a rush from the 50-minute bike dash from my apartment door to floating in the ocean, and even just knowing it’s nearby. Visit a place enough times and seasonal differences emerge, like how the waterline develops a sharp drop-off at the end of the summer, and how it feels like cheating to be swimming in the Atlantic in late September and sometimes later still, the water still holding the last of the summer heat while figures on the beach are bundled in sweatshirts against the wind.

The winding path to reach Battery Harris, as the abandoned gun emplacements are called, goes by a pond; it’s enclosed except for one patch that has been cleared for passersby, with an algae cover that changes from week to week and a surface dive-bombed by insects. Rabbits rustle in the underbrush. The city noise has disappeared.

The Rockaways’ history in coastal defense goes back to the War of 1812, when a blockhouse, a small fortification, was built in the area of Fort Tilden. If, say, the British wooden ship HMS Victory had gotten within a mile of the forts closer to Manhattan and the city’s inner harbor, someone would have licked a shot with a cannonball.

By 1917, Germany’s deadly U-boats were capable of reaching the Eastern Seaboard, and Fort Tilden was constructed soon after the U.S. entered World War I that April. Battery Harris was equipped with six-inch caliber guns, some 26 feet long. By 1924, the batteries were upgraded to 16-inch guns, the largest caliber then in use, that ran 68 feet long and could launch shells 25 miles out to sea, designed to keep enemy ships out of striking range. Dramatic photographs of the guns at Fort Tilden are preserved online, including one taken from above, seemingly atop the long barrel.