Civil War era Construction began on the
Fort at Willets Point in 1862 (named Fort Totten in 1898), after the land was purchased by the U.S. Government in 1857 from the Willets family. The fort is close to the Queens neighborhoods of
Bay Terrace,
Bayside,
Beechhurst and
Whitestone. The original purpose was to defend the
East River approach to
New York Harbor, combined with the preceding
Fort Schuyler, which faces it from
Throggs Neck in
the Bronx on the opposite side of the river entrance. The fort was among several forts of the third system of
seacoast defense in the United States begun in the first year of the Civil War. The initial design was drawn up by
Robert E. Lee in 1857 and modified during construction by
Chief Engineer Joseph G. Totten. Unusually, it was designed with four tiers of cannon facing the water totaling 68 guns. In the United States, only
Castle Williams on
Governors Island,
Fort Wadsworth on
Staten Island, and
Fort Point in San Francisco shared this feature. However, construction was abandoned after the war, as masonry forts were considered obsolete following severe damage to some in the
American Civil War. Only one tier and part of a second tier of the two seacoast walls was completed; the three landward walls received little work.
1869–1890 In 1869 the
Engineer School of Application was established at the future Fort Totten, remaining there until 1901. One of its first missions was the development of
underwater minefields, which with some modernization would remain an important coast defense element through World War II. Major
Henry Larcom Abbot, the first commander of the school, was instrumental in developing these. Two
earthwork batteries were built in the 1870s; the first was a battery of 27 guns as part of a short-lived fort improvement program, while the second was a battery of 16 mortars. The latter was the prototype for the "Abbot Quad" arrangement, developed by Major Abbot and used for the first
12-inch coast defense mortar deployments in the 1890s. In 1871 a tunnel was built connecting the upper 27-gun battery with the incomplete fort. Battery King was built by converting two of the four pits of the earlier mortar battery to concrete, with four mortars in each pit. Unusually, the Coast Defenses of Eastern New York were soon superseded by the concurrently-built
Coast Defenses of Long Island Sound, with most of the guns of the former removed in World War I, and almost all of Fort Totten (except the 3-inch guns) disarmed by 1935. Another history states that only three 8-inch guns arrived in France of the US Army's World War I railway artillery program; most railway guns were not completed until after the Armistice.
Between the wars In 1920 Battery Baker's pair of 3-inch M1898 guns was removed, part of a general removal from service of this type of weapon. Around this time a 3-gun
anti-aircraft battery was built, probably armed with the
3-inch gun M1917.
Cold War In 1954, the fort became a
Project Nike air defense site. Although no Nike missiles were located at Fort Totten, it was the regional headquarters for the New York area; administrative offices and personnel housing were located at the fort. By 1966 the fort was home to the headquarters of the 1st Region,
Army Air Defense Command. Fort Totten was also headquarters for the 66th Anti-Aircraft Missile Battalion and the 41st AAA Gun Battalion. The 66th Anti-Aircraft Missile Battalion's missiles were placed at nearby
Hart Island, with the radars at
Fort Slocum on
Davids Island. The
90 mm gun batteries of the 41st were located throughout Long Island.
1970s According to rumor, Fort Totten was the location of the safe house where
Joe Valachi, the Genovese family mob turncoat and subject of a book called "The Valachi Papers", was hidden in 1970; he was later sent to a Federal prison in Texas where he died the following year. In 1974, as part of defense budget reductions following the end of the
Vietnam War, and due to the disestablishment of the Nike missile system in
CONUS, Fort Totten was closed as a Regular Army installation and the remaining military presence assumed by the Army Reserve. ==Current status==