ZOOLOGICAL 
CONE HONEY CHEETOS UsPren roenesal tspaeT 
SOCIETY 
BULLETIN 43 
THE AQUARIUM, BATTERY PARK 
From a photograph taken by A. Loeffler in 1902, showing the Castle Garden building deeply 
sunken in Battery Park, its gun embrasures only a yard above ground 
Dutch settlers as Kapske rocks, and with walls 
nine feet thick, its foundation should be firm 
enough to support a skyscraper. 
The massive doors of the Aquarium are as old 
as the building itself, and are of considerable 
interest to visitors. They are, in fact, the doors 
of a fort and were constructed to withstand al- 
most any force except the cannon shot of that 
period. 
Today they seem as out of place in New York 
as though they belonged to the Tower of London. 
It is not unlikely, however, that some other forts 
in the country have doors like them. 
The great doors of the Aquarium are each 
twelve feet high, five feet wide and seven inches 
thick. They are constructed of three layers of 
heavy cross-planking, thickly studded with bolts 
all riveted inside, the heads of which are over two 
inches in diameter. The bolts on each door are 
in twelve vertical rows, with thirty-two in each 
row; a total of 768 bolts, five inches apart, for 
both doors. 
The hinges, three to each door, are proportion- 
ately massive. The small sentry or postern door 
that is cut in one of the large doors, is fifty-seven 
inches high and twenty-one inches wide, with a 
ponderous lock, the key to which must have been 
three times the size of the key to the Bastile 
that Lafayette presented to Washington and 
which is exhibited at Mount Vernon. 
The doors were fastened with heavy timbers, 
the ends of which were let into the masonry at 
each end. 
Nothwithstanding its changing scenes the 
building never was deserted. After the social 
activities marking the Castle Garden epoch, end- 
ing in the early ’50s, there was a period of thirty- 
five years’ service as an immigrant depot, during 
which nearly eight millions of immigrants passed 
through its doors. 
After these came the legions of visitors that 
pass through the same doors into the Aquarium 
—forty-three millions of them in the past 
twenty-two years, 
