Chapter Two:
SITE METAPHYSICS
Visibility within the Bay
Newport Neck acts as visible entry point to the East Passage of Narragansett Bay on several levels; Fort Adams and Castle Hill Light are well-known landmarks. Bull Point, across the Passage, does not possess a corresponding visibility, even though it is directly on axis with a southerly approach to the East Passage. Fort Wetherill's current invisibility therefore represents a missed opportunity to articulate this approach axis and create a formal gateway for the East Passage. Moreover, because of its current ruined state, it has become an East Coast counterpart of the former federal prison on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay; it is no small irony that this facility built to keep people out now looks like a place designed to keep them in. It seems appropriate to articulate Bull Point's geographical significance as an entry point to Newport and the East Passage. Bull Point's past mission was invisible control; a significant key to its future lies in its visible celebration of the East Passage and Rhode Island Sound.
Separation and Engagement
As the major component of Fort Wetherill's defense of the East Passage, its guns reinforced and expanded the boundaries between ocean and land by projecting fan-shaped shell trajectory patterns southward over the water. While the horizon is visible from the tops of the ramparts and from the bunkered fire control stations, the relationship of the fort to the seascape is one of detached control. In contrast to the fort's relationship to the water as a barrier, its relationship with the sky above and earth below is one of explicit, if unintended, engagement. The gun platforms and adjacent operations areas were left exposed to above, not because of a functional relationship with the sky, but because an airborne attack was not considered technically feasible. Because of this lack of overhead cover, the existing concentric gun platforms act as receptors of the vastness of sky in a grand connection of ocean, sky and earth, as can be readily experienced by standing atop the ramparts. Likewise, the fort manifests an engagement with the earth by virtue of being built into it. The lower levels were designed as a series of protected ammunition storage and transportation spaces carved into the concrete ramparts, isolated from the gun mounts by double-wall construction and effectively buried out of the path of incoming fire. As one proceeds through the blackness of space with only a flashlight beam for orientation, the perception is one of entering the domain of bedrock, and that somewhere nearby, a passage exists to levels below. No doubt, with sufficient illumination, the utter darkness of their interiors would yield to the banality of discrete, claustrophobic vaults. Yet where the eye cannot see, the mind extends downwards towards a mythic realm. In this darkness, the spaces extend deeper than mere building to become a phenomenal and symbolic connector to the earth's chthonic nether regions.
THE GREATER SITE
Water and Air
The ocean as viewed from the heights of Wetherill's cliffs is a rippled, elemental, horizontal surface, a broad blue-green tablecloth connecting and arranging land, ships and horizon. It is the denser counterpart of the disembodied, arching sky above, mirroring clouds and colors, and making the wind visible with its chameleon skin. While it affords unimpeded sight to all that touches its surface, the constant motion of the big ocean combers humping up in the shoaling waters bears witness to an unseen realm below. Here, the ocean becomes a phenomenal paradox for its ability to clarify and give order to vision on one level only to thwart it on another. What cannot be viewed from Wetherill's cliffs are the complexities of current, reefs, bottom materials, and sea life. Nor can be seen the sunken hulks of the collier, Black Point, four nautical miles off Point Judith, and the German submarine, U-853, twenty miles due south of Wetherill. Their stories are held in the darkness of Block Island Sound's shifting currents and silt. Paradox is also descriptive of water's ontology insofar as it is that most common, essential element of humanity, yet, in its grandest manifestation as ocean, it constitutes a world apart from human affairs. As ocean, water represents a savage Nature from whose bigness and fury there is little shelter.
Navigation
Lighthouses, buoys, towers, an other aids to navigation serve as markers for the coastal and harbor waters, defining lanes of safe passage and mark shallow or otherwise dangerous waters by visual, auditory and electronic means. They are probes into that which is just past human sight, signaling the direction of tide and changes in weather. They are mirrored constellations overlaying the ocean surface, visually and sonically describing the coastal waters with geometric matrices. As collective guideposts, they shadow the coastline with a continuous linear boundary between the deep ocean and the land.
Aids to navigation are present at Wetherill as ephemeral rhythms of light and curling, echoing sound that reach out across the wide water, breaching the diffuse roar of wind and spraying waves that hold auditory space fast against the rocks. As machines, their horns and lights sound and flash at timed intervals; several of these heard together form repeating tonal phrases that can assume a musical character. Into this mix of measured, if unintentional rhythms, the bell and gong buoys add the random meters of the waves. These multi-layered phrases possess a spatial character because their sounds emanate from points several miles away from each other. They echo off landforms and echo each other, thereby increasing the size of space on one hand, and delimit the orderliness of coastal space on the other, as the sporadic sound hovers between coherence and evanescence.
Coastline
Wetherill articulates a boundary layer that simultaneously connects and separates land from ocean, and reinforces the existing coastal edge condition at the granite cliffs of Bull Point. Round Swamp and Beavertail Point, on the west side of the island, represent different coastal edge conditions that place Wetherill within a larger context of Narragansett Bay. Round Swamp is a broad salt marsh that makes an undulating, ballooned incursion into the western edge of Conanicut Island at its north-south midpoint. It opens to the shallow, sandy-bottomed waters of Dutch Harbor to the west and connects to the East Passage by Great Creek. At a larger scale, land surrounds water at Round Swamp as an inversion of Conanicut's relationship to Narragansett Bay. At a smaller scale, the marsh, as literal wetlands, represents an interwoven boundary of water and land and plant forms common to both. The elements are soft, consisting of water, sand, silt and vegetation; there are no strictly defined elements in this transition zone that alternately gives and takes back land with the tides. Because the area lies within a coastal flood plain, its sole built structure is a run-down shack at the water's edge.
Beavertail Point is a granite-edged spit of land projecting from the southwest corner of Conanicut towards Point Judith. At its tip, Beavertail Light has served continuously as a navigation aid since the eighteenth century, and currently serves as the focal point of a fifteen-acre state park. Similar to Bull Point, the area was a former military reservation named Fort Burnside and contained the Prospect Hill Fire Control Station, several 3" and 6" gun batteries, and a two hundred-foot high, guyed metal communications tower. A visitors' center and maritime museum occupies the light keeper's house, while pedestal-mounted display boards along the walkway outside identify plant and animal species within the local ecosystem.
While similar to Wetherill because of its military history and current status as a state park, Beavertail Point has a significantly different relationship with Narragansett Bay. Its dominant built form is the black-capped rectangular white masonry light tower with attached keeper's quarters. This building reads formally and functionally as a geometric object/locus set against the ocean datum, marking the point where the slivered land extends into the water. A perimeter loop road and a fissured granite apron surround the light and connect it to the ocean. Both the road and the rocks are used by the public as an inside-out theater with a 300° view of the Bay. Because of easy access to the ocean on a number of levels, the park is a popular weekend destination for a broad cross-section of people, including island residents on bicycle with kids in tow, and older couples with picnic baskets, lawn chairs, and the Sunday paper. Surfcasters and scuba divers are attracted by the undersea life that inhabits the moderately sloped rocky underwater coastline. The equally moderate slope above the water permits access to narrow spits of rock projecting into the surf, where a person becomes a smaller-scale marker enveloped in the motion and sound of the palpable, immediate ocean.
Beavertail Point State Park thus presents a visual, audible, tactile and intellectual immersion in this particular coastal environment as a way of life with connections to the water on commercial and recreational levels. By most standards, it functions well as a popular, upbeat public space, a working family's version of Newport's Brenton Point. The military legacy appears to have been largely eliminated, however. A visit to the area in the early 1970's revealed a number of communications buildings and antennae that have since been removed. The park's current status reflects an apparent planning conclusion that military issues would not be part of the park's mission. Of the military structures built on this site, only the magazine of Battery Whiting remains, hidden by brush and small trees at the park's southeastern edge.
Fort Wetherill represents the most detached relationship between water and land and the strongest military presence of the three coastal conditions. Its eighty-foot high granite outcroppings contrast the low-lying coastline at Beavertail Point, and are equaled locally only by the headlands of Block Island's Mohegan Bluffs. If Beavertail offers close, tactile connection between land and water, Wetherill reflects a more detached, controlling posture toward the Bay. As a progression, Round Swamp can be interpreted as a diffuse, integrated balance of water and land systems, and Beavertail Point introduces a geometric center and a harder edge between water and land. Wetherill takes this hard edge, extrudes it to produce a natural sheared connection between water and land, and reinforces it with the series of batteries as a built edge.
The batteries of Fort Wetherill not only reinforce this dramatic sheered connection between land and ocean in formal terms, but also comment on human interaction with the natural world. Standing at cliff's edge at Wetherill, one is presented with a commanding view of the ocean, which is a far different experience than sitting with one foot in the surf at Beavertail. At Wetherill, the relationship between the dominant fort above and ocean below symbolizes a separation between the walled town and an uncontrolled world outside its gates. Beavertail represents a friendly invitation to come closer to the water; it is Conanicut's front porch to the ocean while Wetherill is the gothic edge of the citadel. Beavertail is a public lesson in coastal ecology and, by extension, an advocacy of the unity of humanity and Nature. Wetherill broods on war and is otherwise a meditation on boundaries and separateness.
© 2024 Philip S. Wheelock, Jr. AIA