38 
ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY 
BULLETIN 
THE OLD DOORS OF THE AQUARIUM 
These are the original doors of Southwest Battery. 
are studded with 768 iron bolts. 
in 1808, that operations were probably suspended 
in 1809 and 1810 and resumed in 1811 when the 
work was completed, and that it was turned over 
to the authorities of the City of New York, June 
ZO WUS2oen 
In referring to the changes taking place in 
the neighborhood of the Battery at the begin- 
ning of the century, Thomas A. Janvier in Old 
New York writes as follows: 
“Meanwhile there had been set up in this 
region another military engine of destruction 
which never came to blows with any- 
body, but led always a life of peaceful usefulness 
that is not yet at an end. This was the South- 
They are twelve feet high, seven inches thick, and 
The small postern door is 57 inches high 
west Battery that later was to be known honor- 
ably as Castle Clinton; that still later was to 
become notable, and then notorious, as Castle 
Garden; and that at the present time is to take 
a fresh start in respectability as the Aquarium. 
“It is not easy to realize, nowadays, as we see 
this chunky little fort standing on dry ground 
A that when it was built, between the 
years 1807 and 1811, it was a good hundred yards 
out from the shore. . . . 
“The Battery Park, or Battery Walk, as it in- 
differently was called, of that period, was a 
crescent-shaped piece of ground of about ten 
acres—being less than half of the size of the 
