 Image: David Moore
Today: David Moore, co-founder of Sludge; and Amy Chu, artist and publisher of Camoot.Journal.
Issue No. 169The Guns at Fort Tilden
David Moore Body Positivity
Amy Chu
The Guns at Fort TildenOff 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.  Image: David Moore 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. But within a decade, the development of fast fighter planes had rendered the massive guns obsolete. When the U.S. was readying to enter World War II Fort Tilden was beefed up again with new barracks and military personnel, and in those years, the batteries were fortified too. The New York Times’s Corey Kilgannon noted in 2006 that the fortifications were intended not only to to protect against bombing, but “so that they wouldn’t be turned on New York City by an invading enemy, a heady fact to ponder when you’re standing in a wet bathing suit.”
Birders are the most frequent visitors to the unadorned viewing platform atop Battery Harris East, climbing a wooden staircase to reach it; there are views of Manhattan’s skyline in the far distance, the bridge named after baseball player Gil Hodges closer by, and the wide-open sky above the ocean. Lately there have been only a few other people around. The quiet and unplaceable ruins trigger a feeling of intoxication, displacedness, especially the short walk to Battery Harris West when the sun is setting. (And yes, the padlocked forts in the dunes and their imposing casemates are straight out of the TV show “Lost,” maybe the most LOST Island thing.) In June 2009, the NYC-based independent show promoter Todd P moved a rambling mostly-unamplified summer show to the beach here, having held the event in previous years on the tip of Roosevelt Island, across from Midtown East. Friends and I voyaged out to the dunes to see Javelin, Liturgy, Ponytail, Teengirl Fantasy, Knyfe Hyts, Necking, Aa aka BIG A little a, Ninjasonik and others, in an impressively sprawling crowd. Behatted park rangers surveilled the influx of long-haired freaky people in somewhat comical confusion. Those interested in the shaggy-haircut and plain-hoodie-sporting music scene in those years may relive it at YouTube, which offers some songs from the Todd P-organized shows at Roosevelt Island, and the channel unARTigNYC has reams of videos recorded at venues like Death by Audio, Cake Shop, and Silent Barn. Thanks to these archives, anyone can still see Japanther knock out a set under a tarp in the rain at a solar-powered festival called CitySol. I remember that day better than I do most days.
For many years the park rangers left people pretty much alone with their 12-packs of Modelo in the sheltering dunes of Fort Tilden. But the area was slammed by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, leaving the foredunes flattened and much more beach exposed. Photos taken by Tod Seelie in the six months after the storm show ranger stations stripped to their framing and concrete walkways chewed up. The beach was officially closed for two years and was subsequently treated with resiliency efforts. A fire last year dealt the near-final blow to the former train garage where the artist Yayoi Kusama, in 2018, mounted an installation in her series, Narcissus Garden.
In the 1950s, Fort Tilden was armed with surface-to-air nuclear defense missiles. National Park Service photos show its radar facility sporting some quintessential Cold War-era operating equipment, and the Army published a less-than-reassuring illustration of how it would work. The Nikes—whose effectiveness had been doubted by both presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy—were disarmed in 1974, after the first SALT treaty with the Soviet Union. The site is still cordoned off. Biking to the beach you ride past Floyd Bennett Field, where Larry David was detailed as an Army reservist in the 1970s, spending weekends in an airplane hangar before he faked a psychiatric issue to cut his time early. The vast, centuries-old footprint of the U.S. military leaving its traces on place after place. We analyze the Pentagon budget regularly at our news site Sludge, and the hundreds of billions of dollars flowing every single year through the opaque congressional budget process can seem impenetrable; a burn pit of wasted resources and lost human lives. Even after the Cold War wound down, the military kept on spending. An internal study by the Pentagon, buried in 2015 but obtained by the Washington Post, found $125 billion in potential savings over five years just by cracking down on bureaucratic waste. For comparison, so-called fiscal conservatives in Congress blocked the Democrats’ signature social spending bill in 2021 because, under one Congressional Budget Office analysis, it would have impacted the federal deficit by $15.6 billion a year—far less, in other words, than the Pentagon squanders on internal waste alone. Another point of comparison: the U.S. spends only about 1% on diplomacy under the State Department of what it throws into the Pentagon’s maw each year.
Over the years, the buildings and concrete pillboxes scattered around Fort Tilden have been decorated by graffiti. On the afternoons when a sudden storm would blow in, they became bivouacs packed with sheltering beachgoers, rolling cigarettes and drinking the last of the cans and playing music on portable speakers. The afternoon I took the snapshots for this post, Sept. 22, someone had just recently scrubbed Harris Battery East of its latest tags.
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Body Positivity
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