Decode the Island.

The Island NYC Forgot It Had

Governors Island sits 800 yards off the southern tip of Manhattan — close enough to see the windows of the Financial District, close enough to hear the foghorns, but sealed off from the public for most of a century. The Lenape people called it Pagganck, meaning "nut island," for the hickory and chestnut trees that covered it. Dutch settlers called it Nutten Island for the same reason. The British renamed it Governors Island in 1698 when they reserved it exclusively for the use of New York's royal governors — a perk of office that included a mansion, orchards, and unobstructed harbor views. The American military took it over after the Revolution and never really let go until 1996, when the Army transferred it to the Coast Guard, which handed it back to New York City in 2003. For 200 years, the island existed in the city's skyline without belonging to it.

The two fortifications on the northern end of the island tell the story of American military ambition in compressed stone. Fort Jay — the star-shaped earthwork fort built between 1794 and 1796, later encased in granite — was named for John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who lived nearby. During the Civil War, its parade ground and barracks held Confederate prisoners of war. Castle Williams, the circular red sandstone fort completed in 1811, was designed by Colonel Jonathan Williams, Benjamin Franklin's grandnephew and the first superintendent of West Point. Its three-story walls are seven feet thick and it was intended to work in concert with Fort Columbus across the water at the Battery, catching enemy ships in a cross-fire. It never fired a shot in anger. Instead it held 3,000 Confederate prisoners after 1862, with the men sleeping in tiers along the circular walls, visible to each other and to the sky through the open center court. The marks left by those men — initials scratched into the sandstone, improvised chess boards carved into window ledges — are still there.

Since the city took full ownership of the island in 2010, it has been transformed into one of the most unusual public parks in the world. The Hills — four artificial mounds built between 2015 and 2016 from nearly a million cubic feet of soil excavated during Manhattan construction projects — rise up to 70 feet above sea level and offer views of the Statue of Liberty unavailable from anywhere else without paying for a ferry ticket. The Victorian houses of Nolan Park, built in the 1870s and 1880s for Army officers and their families, have been converted into artist studios and residences. In December 1988, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev held a brief but historic summit meeting on the island, marking one of the Cold War's quieter turning points. A StoryHunt on Governors Island threads through all of it — the scratched initials, the cold-war echoes, the hills made from Manhattan's own excavated earth — on an island that is still, somehow, one of the least crowded places in New York.