Twenty-five acres at the bottom of the island, named for the gun battery that stood here, and the departure point for every boat in the harbour.
Land that was not there
Almost all of this park is landfill. The original shoreline of Manhattan ran roughly along State Street, and the artillery battery the park is named for stood at the water’s edge there in the seventeenth century. Everything seaward of that line was filled in over the following two centuries.
Castle Clinton, the round sandstone fort in the middle of the park, was built in 1811 on an artificial island 200 feet offshore, connected by a causeway. The fill eventually reached it and joined it to the land. It has since been, in order: a fort that never fired a shot in anger, a concert hall where Jenny Lind sang for P. T. Barnum, the immigration depot that processed eight million people before Ellis Island opened, and the New York Aquarium. It is now a National Monument, free to walk into, and the ticket office for the harbour ferries.
What else is in the park
The Sphere, Fritz Koenig’s bronze sculpture that stood in the plaza between the twin towers, damaged but intact, was moved here after 11 September and is now a memorial with an eternal flame.
The East Coast Memorial — eight granite slabs listing 4,601 American servicemen lost in the western Atlantic in the Second World War, with a bronze eagle facing the harbour.
The SeaGlass Carousel is a small, strange, beautiful thing: you sit inside a fibreglass fish that rotates on its own axis while the whole platform turns, in a nautilus-shaped glass pavilion with no horses and no visible mechanism. It is ticketed and cheap and it is worth it whether or not you have children.
The Battery Gardens are managed as a naturalistic perennial planting by Piet Oudolf, the same designer as the High Line, and they are at their best in late summer.
The Battery Urban Farm is a working educational farm run with local schools.
Boats
Everything leaves from here or near here. Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island ferries from Castle Clinton. The Staten Island Ferry from the Whitehall Terminal at the eastern edge. Governors Island from the Battery Maritime Building next door. NYC Ferry from Pier 11 a short walk up the East River side.
Practical
Free and always open. It is windy — it is the point of the island — and there is little shelter.
The Bowling Green subway entrance at the north-east corner is the oldest park in the city, a small oval that was New York’s first, and the Charging Bull stands just north of it.
More The Waterfront
Staten Island Ferry
Twenty-five minutes across New York Harbour past the Statue of Liberty, every half hour, around the clock, for nothing. The best free thing in the city.
Ellis Island
Twelve million people came through this hall between 1892 and 1954. Around forty per cent of Americans have an ancestor who was processed in it.
Governors Island
An army base for two centuries, closed to the public until 2005, now 172 acres of car-free park eight minutes by ferry from Lower Manhattan.