Battery Harris is located in the mixed maritime forest and grasslands area of the Rockaway Peninsula in southern Queens in New York City. The western portion of the peninsula served military purposes since the War of 1812, given its strategically advantageous relation to both New York Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean.  By the early twentieth century, the longer firing-range capabilities of arms on seafaring vessels rendered older batteries in more central locations unable to adequately defend the city. Taking enemy boats out further offshore became imperative, and consequently, Rockaway Peninsula and Sandy Hook, New Jersey on the opposite side of Lower New York Bay, became increasingly strategically relevant.   

  

 

 

 

Upon entering World War I in 1917, the United States government began to establish a more committed Rockaway garrison, Fort Tilden.  Originally called “Camp Rockaway,” the fort was heavily armed from the outset, outfitted with 6-inch guns and 12-inch mortars, among other weapons.   Still fairly isolated from Brooklyn and the more populated areas of the peninsula, Fort Tilden’s supplies were delivered to a wharf on Rockaway Inlet and then distributed by rail to a series of storage magazines and military installations, the remnants of which dot Fort Tilden's now-overgrown 317 acres like the ruins follies of British gardens, like a latter-day Piranesi incarnate.

 

 

Shortly after the establishment of the new fort, the War Department ordered for the emplacement of two 16-inch gun batteries to be installed on barbette cartridges.  These extremely powerful, 170-ton guns were capable of 360-degree horizontal movement.  They could destroy enemy vessels long before they approached New York Harbor and were capable of sinking large ships eleven miles offshore.  This installation thus became increasingly important during World War II, when German submarines menaced American shipping vessels during the Battle of Atlantic.

 

 

The 16-inch gun batteries were unsheltered for over two decades, until the early part of World War II when they were finally casemated. The partially earth-covered concrete casemates were built in 1941-42 to protect the guns from aerial attack and to protect New York from the guns themselves: the casemates restricted the guns’ horizontal firing range to 145 degrees and narrowed their vertical movement from 69 to 47 degrees, ensuring that they could not be turned around and trained on the city in the event of enemy infiltration.

 

 

 

 Fort Story, Virginia Beach, VA

 

 

The casemates were installed simultaneously with the installation of two similar casemates for the 16-inch guns  at Battery Lewis in Navesink, NJ, the highlands section of the most concentrated constellation of coastal artillery defense installations in the country, a several-mile cluster which also includes Fort Hancock’s Battery Potter (1892), the nation’s first and only steam-lifted disappearing gun battery and a pioneering example of the use of concrete for military architecture.  Batteries Harris and Lewis also closely resemble the casemates at Camp Hero in Montauk, Fort Story in Virginia Beach, and Fort Funston in San Francisco, all defined by the unique semi-circular protuberance, which covered the guns and carriages and which formally set the structures apart from older artillery fortification structures.  The architecture of the battery thus closely, if unwittingly, follows Louis Sullivan’s imperative that function dictate form, a defining Modernist ethos.  
 

 

 

 

Battery Harris’ form departs from that of the angular, crenellated structures that populate the Platonic ideal of the architecture of defense in the Western image-repertoire, an ideal that had informed the residually castle-like Battery Potter.   Instead, Battery Harris elicits associations with various forms of spiritual architecture, both venerative and tombal.  The battery’s plan is cruciform, with shortened transepts like a Latin cross but equidistant “nave” sections, like a Greek cross. The main nave-like aisle is flanked by small chapel-like rooms, which were originally used for ammunition storage. 
 

 

 

Approaching the battery from the south side (where the gun was), associative recollections of temples-in-the-round, the Great Stupa at Sanchi, and the fat, spiraling minaret of the Great Mosque of Samarra generate. Though Battery Harris’ entrance is at ground level, the entire structure is essentially underground, as the casemate is covered by a thin layer of dirt, which has accumulated low but dense maritime vegetation, identical to that of the surrounding landscape.  Thus, the entire church-like space is in the uncanny state of being at once underground and at ground level. Entering Battery Harris is not unlike walking into Philip Johnson’s hill-bound subterranean painting gallery in New Canaan, CT, or, presumably the Mycenaean Treasury of Atreus (Tomb of Agamemnon), upon which Johnson's gallery was based. The temple-cum-tomb sensibility is apropos, as the museum is itself a sort of body-less tomb.

After World War II, the guns at Battery Harris remained in place for only four years, at which point they were sold for scrap metal. Thus the guns and the casemates were only in place together for seven years.  Fort Tilden was declassified in 1974, and the land and former military installations were transferred to the National Parks Department.
 

 

 

Battery Harris is open to air on all sides, as the building once accommodated the direct transport of weapons via rail; tracks still visibly run through much of the interior and are seemingly still resurrectably functional. Though all sides of the building could function as entrances, the building is most dramatically approached from the south portal, former site of the gun. Visitors would enter RoMoCA through the south portal under the hood of the casemate.  Under this roof, an existing pavement winds around a circular plaza that once held the cartridge and gun; this space provides the setting for a gateway artwork related to the exhibition.  The nave-like main corridor provides a space for the primary gallery for larger works, while the chapel-like rooms that were originally used for ammunition storage accommodate the museum’s smaller galleries for drawings and related material, and the naturally low-light conditions of the cavernous structure provide a well-adapted setting for projection-oriented exhibitions.

 

 

 

These renderings show Battery Harris in hypothetical exhibition situations. Renderings conceptualize views of the "transepts" looking north from the south portal, the “nave” in an exhibition situation, and the "transpets" depicted in a cross section that demonstrates the underground nature of the space.  The renderings show the rail tracks being reused for moving plinths for three-dimensional works.  Lighting has been added to the ceiling of the plan, but otherwise the concept is for a minimally invasive, preservation-minded repurposing of a building that played a notable role in American history.

 

 

 Bureau V and Museo Publications, Rockaway Museum of Contemporary Art, 2009, digital rendering