NP - Bannerman's Island

[David Morris]

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2007/11/bannermans-island.html

This island fortress was once the private arsenal of the world's
largest arms dealer.  And that was Frank "Francis" Bannerman.

Bannerman bought up ninety per cent of all captured guns, ammunition,
and other equipment auctioned off after the Spanish-American War. He
also bought weapons directly from the Spanish government before it
evacuated Cuba. These purchases vastly exceeded the firm's capacity at
its store in Manhattan and filled three huge Brooklyn warehouses with
munitions, including thirty million cartridges." Accordinglty,
"Bannerman now needed an arsenal."

Or, more accurately speaking: he needed a private island.

Bannerman soon purchased "six and a half acres of scrub-covered rock
called Polopel's Island, about fifty-five miles north of New York
City." But even that wasn't enough. He then "bought seven acres more
of underwater land in front of the island from the state of New York.
He ringed the submerged area with sunken canalboats, barges, and
railroad floats to form a breakwater" – a kind of artificial reef.

"The island was under continuous construction for eighteen years."

The castle was Bannerman's vision and his execution. It was creviced
and encrusted with battlements, towers, turrets, crenellations,
parapets, embrasures, casements, and corbelling. Huge iron baskets
suspended from the castle corners held gas-fed lamps that burned in
the night like ancient torches. By day Bannerman's castle gave the
river a fairyland aspect. By night it threw a brooding silhouette
against the Hudson skyline.

Visitors approached the place along a breakwater bristling with cannon
and then passed through an opening flanked by two watchtowers. After
tying up their boat at a large unloading dock they crossed a moat
spanned by a drawbridge and passed under a portcullis crowned by the
Bannerman coat of arms carved in stone.

Bannerman died a week after the end of World War I – and the island
had sunk into a state of "monumental decay" by the 1960s.

It was then gutted by arsonists.

The construction quality was lacking.  Bannerman used old musket
barrels to reinforce some of the concrete walls.
Architecture as a kind of thinly described weapon: like almost all
archaeology, scrape deep enough and you'll uncover the residues of
warfare.


http://www.hudsonriver.com/bannerman.htm

At the close of the Civil War, the U.S. government auctioned off
military goods by the ton, mostly to be scrapped for their metal.
Young Frank can be called the "Father of the Army-Navy Store," for he
was one of the first to realize that much of what was being sold had a
market value higher than scrap. Under his guidance, Bannerman's became
the world's largest buyer of surplus military equipment. Their
storeroom and showroom, taking up a full block at 501 Broadway, opened
to the public in 1905. Of it, the New York Herald said, "No museum in
the world exceeds it in the number of exhibits."

In the early 1900s, Bannerman's supply of military goods was
staggering. Nations at peace were his customers. Thom Johnson
approximates that "50 percent of the commemorative cannons placed in
public areas were purchased through Bannerman's." And nations at war
outfitted whole armies through Bannerman's. During the
Russian-Japanese war, Bannerman's filled an order for 100,000 saddles,
rifles, knapsacks, haversacks, gun slings, uniforms and 20 million
cartridges, as well as a shipload of assorted military goods.

Collectors claim that the Bannerman catalog is the best book ever
written on weapons of war. Published regularly from the 1880s to the
1960s, its approximately 350 illustrated pages feature African arrows
with metal barbed points to a Moroccan sheik saddle in serviceable
order. They supplied countless theatrical productions with uniforms
for costumes, and many illustrators and painters with military detail.
But the Bannerman family also understood little boys. They advertised
their large, illustrated catalog in the back of pulp magazines in the
1920s and '30s for 40 cents.

"To my generation, Bannerman's was a real evocative name," says Bob
Parker, now a man nearing 70. "My brother and I used to get the
catalog in New Mexico where we lived in the 1930s, and buy kepis
(hats) issued in the Civil War for seventy five cents! A lot of things
came in their original crates, never unpacked. It was a great place
for tack, cots, tents, saddles ... I still have my kepi from 1935."