4. The Block House

Location: Governors Island
Built: 1839
Architect: Unknown
National Register Number: 72000863
Listed: July 24, 1972
Visited: July 21, 2007



The Block House, another austere brick building, is also underused: it's locked up just like the Governor's House. I fling around the word "underused" too haughtily, though: after visiting a few more locked-up or unfurnished buildings, it's not clear to me how these buildings could be used in any historically-sensitive way. All the landmarked residences were built in multiple eras and had multiple purposes throughout the last 150-200 years (The Brick House, for example, during different eras served as a hospital, a prison, army headquarters, and apartments), with no particular era or purpose inherently more fascinating (or representative) than any other, and thus each building has no single historical fact they can illustrate and no single state they should be restored to.