Fort Wadsworth

Shore Acres
Staten Island

Not too long ago I had a rather disappointing visit to the Alice Austen House Museum located near the Verrazano-Narrow’s Bridge on Staten Island. Determined that the day wouldn’t be a bust, my boyfriend and I decided to head over to nearby Fort Wadsworth in time for the 2pm weekend tour. As it turns out, the Visitor’s Center is closed for renovations until an undisclosed date, so the tour didn’t happen, but that did not stop Fort Wadsworth from saving the day.

I don’t even know where to begin with this place. While walking around Fort Tompkins—the main building at Wadsworth—looking for any signs of a tour group meeting, Ben and I began seeing signs directing visitors not to feed the goats. That’s right: goats. Several small herds of goats are employed with the task of clearing away unwanted invasive vegetation. Fort Wadsworth is one of the oldest military installations in America, first fortified by the British in 1779 before being developed further by the United States after 1807. The main structures of Fort Tompkins and various batteries came into disuse in the 1960s, so when the Navy turned over Wadsworth to the National Park Service’s Gateway National Park in 1994, the Park Service had a great deal of unchecked plant growth to deal with. The goats are a green solution that doesn’t use any fossil fuels.

Then there’s the park rangers, who are awesome (at least the one we talked to). Determined to get some semblance of a tour, I stopped a passing ranger to ask if the 2pm tours were still running. He gave a long explanation about the renovations at the Visitor’s Center then decided to find someone to let us into Fort Tompkins. He insisted he was a preservation ranger, not an interpretive ranger who gives tours, yet he seemed to know a lot more about Wadsworth than the two young rangers who let us into Fort Tompkins. Some other visitors followed us into Tompkins and when one man asked one of the young rangers if it had been a barracks, the ranger responded, “Barracks?” in a manner that indicated he had no idea what a barracks was. Mr. Well-Informed Ranger answered that yes, it had been, and he also answered all my questions about the goats, though he personally would prefer job creation by the hiring of groundskeepers over green goats.

Some of the buildings are eerily rundown and overgrown. It was a bit creepy visiting them in the middle of the day; I can’t imagine how eerie the nighttime lantern tours that are occasionally offered would be. The grounds of Battery Weed are well-maintained, but the nearby Torpedo Shed that was destroyed in a fire in the 1980s has been allowed to run completely wild. If you plan your visit correctly, you might get a glimpse of  Mont Sec House, which was built in 1889 and has been restored to how it looked in the 1890s. Fort Wadsworth prided itself on providing comfortable living quarters for officers and their families. This was at a time when many officers’ families had to settle for sparse conditions along America’s western frontier.

If you have your heart set on a guided tour that will take you inside the buildings at Fort Wadworth, be sure to call ahead to avoid disappointment. If it’s not such a big deal, print out a map and guide yourself—there are plenty of historic placards around the Fort to inform the biggest of military nerds. Fort Wadsworth is also one of only two places in New York City where camping is allowed (the other is Floyd Bennett Field near Rockaway in Queens).

http://nyharborparks.org/visit/fowa.html

http://www.nps.gov/gate/historyculture/ftwad.htm