Governor's Island is a short ferry ride from downtown Brooklyn, an island that for centuries acted as a mustering point for different military ventures. The British have used it, as well as the Union Army during the Civil War, the American Army during both world wars, and its Castle Williams, built in the 1840s as a prison, remained in use in this capacity--military brig--until the 1960s.
The first people to really live upon the island, after, of course, the Lenape natives, were almost exclusively military personal, as many generations of soldiers trained there. Here is a picture of the commanding officer's quarters.
Sometimes as you walk around the community on the island, it strikes you as not seeming to have been military personnel, as this picture looks like a neighborhood out of colonial America.
This next picture shows the barracks for the military school in the foreground, with lower Manhattan's skyscrapers in the background, looking as if they were just a few blocks away, and not a couple of miles away across the bay created by the meeting of the East and Hudson Rivers.
The island is closed from mid-October until mid-May, so it's with good reason it's considered a Summer getaway. It helps that ferries run every twenty minutes from Brooklyn and Manhattan, and are free. The day we went, the line stretched for a while, and we waited for just over a half-hour, watching two ferries leave without us. The ferries were running more often that Sunday, mainly because demand was high because it was a nice day and there was an art festival.
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