ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY 
CASTLE GARDEN 
Showing the building as an immigrant station after the extension of Battery Park. 
not yet been completed. The old Battery Walk 
from 
BULLETIN 4] 
IN 1869 
The 
southward, 
had 
From 
sea wall 
Greenwich Street remains. 
a color print eight by twelve inches 
Battery Park of the present day—which ended 
at the water-side in a little bluff, capped by a 
wooden fence, with a shingly beach beyond.” 
Mr. Janvier adds that Southwest Battery 
never fired a shot against an enemy. 
An examination of the map (page 39) is 
desirable, as it makes clear the position of the 
building with respect to the shore line which 
was finally so extended as to bring the structure 
within the limits of what is now Battery Park. 
The dark wavy line on the map marks the orig- 
inal shore line of lower Manhattan. The tree- 
covered strip then known as “The Battery” was 
very narrow as compared with its present area. 
By comparing cut and map (page 39) it 
will be seen that the side-wheel steamers docked 
immediately north of Castle Garden, poking 
their bowsprits into Washington Street, are lying 
farther inshore by the width of a whole block 
and a street, than they could at present. West 
Street and the block between it and Washington 
Street, rest on land reclaimed by a long process 
of filling in. 
An interesting view of the building (page 40), 
when it still was a fort, is shown in the cut of 
an eighteen-inch blue platter. The hand of 
the disfiguring vandal had not yet been laid 
upon the exterior of the fort. A dozen or more 
similar pictures of it are to be found on the old 
blue colonial tableware of the period. This 
platter, considered a gem by collectors, was pre- 
sented to the Aquarium by the Misses Earle, of 
New York, in 1896, when the building started 
on its career as an aquarium. Its duplicate sold 
in Boston, in November, 1901, for one hundred 
and seven dollars and seventy-five cents. 
The landing of Lafayette, in 1824, at Castle 
Garden, is pictured on a piece of this tableware, 
one of the Clews patterns, now seldom to be 
found except in the hands of collectors. The 
Staffordshire potteries produced much printed 
china for the American market a century ago. 
There are in existence many more prints of 
this building than are presented here, some of 
which relate to the military period of its history 
when it was simply an unadorned fort. After 
it had been abandoned to municipal control it 
acquired many architectural excrescences. A 
study of the prints of this second period shows 
that its wooden superstructure—the part above 
the original masonry walls—was altered many 
times. While it stood off shore the view of its 
walls from the land was almost cut off by sur- 
rounding outbuildings supported on piles. For 
many years there was a covered balcony around 
the top. While being remodeled for use as an 
