As a thank you to veterans I offer this photo: what you’re looking at is most likely a very very old (WW1) machine gun placement I stumbled across today at the old Ft. Tilden (on Rockaway) – This concrete foundation has been under sand for decades, and Hurricane Sandy washed away all of that sand covering it. It lasted through the storm (along with all the other old bunkers) even while the road along the beach crumbled away and is now completely destroyed. The dune that separated the road from the beach has also completely washed away.
As for this gun placement – let’s just say it was built to last by men that didn’t compromise.
This gun placement was one of two, connected to the bunker seen in the above photos – and was known as ‘Battery Kessler’. We’ll be posting a whole lot about Ft. Tilden sometime in the next year.
The bunkers at Ft. Tilden also survived, all very much intact. As you can see one of them (directly behind the gun turret) now has trees stuffed in it from the water that flowed through.
The storm also up/uncovered a long stick of railroad track. This likely came from somewhere on the Tilden property, given how old it looks and the fact that Ft. Tilden once had it’s own military railroad. In different areas this long buried track is also now exposed, revealing rotted out cross-ties and rusted railroad spikes.
More on that in the coming months when we give a deeper dive into Ft. Tilden history.
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