Second Battery Armory

1122 Franklin Avenue | also 1140 Franklin Avenue | Morrisania | built 1911

Open on the map4 entries

The lot about 1940
About 1940. Via 1940s.nyc
The lot about 1985
About 1985. Via 80s.nyc

The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.

Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.

  1. 1906

    Civil War veteran Charles C. Haight wins the commission for the Bronx's first permanent armory

    Architect Charles Coolidge Haight had served in the Seventh Regiment and was wounded at the Battle of the Wilderness in May 1864 before turning to architecture. Known for Collegiate Gothic work, including eleven buildings at Yale, he designed the Second Battery Armory in 1906-08, a late example of his public institutions, using a restrained Gothic vocabulary in brick and stone.

    “…wounded at the Battle of the Wilderness in Virginia in May of 1864, he retired from the military.”

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  2. 1910

    June

    The Second Battery moves into its new Franklin Avenue armory

    In February 1902 fire wrecked the 71st Regiment's armory on Park Avenue at 33rd Street, then home to the Second Battery as well, and the artillery unit moved to a temporary armory on Bathgate Avenue. The city chose this sloping corner at Franklin Avenue and East 166th Street, once a small wooded estate, and the battery moved in during June 1910. The building was officially finished at the end of January 1911.

    “The Second Battery moved into its new armory in June of 1910, though official completion of the building did not occur until the end of January of 1911.”

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  3. 1917

    February

    Critic Montgomery Schuyler rates the armory close to the best building in the Bronx

    Writing in Architectural Record in February 1917, Montgomery Schuyler had harsh words for most Bronx buildings but singled out this armory as nearly the finest in the borough. He praised its 300-foot flank wall, its three pairs of buttresses carrying the roof trusses, and its sparing use of medieval touches. In 1910 the journal Architecture had already called it probably the best armory in New York.

    “…considered the armory virtually the best building in the entire borough of The Bronx.”

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  4. 1988

    The state gives up the armory, which becomes a city shelter for homeless New Yorkers

    The Second Battery's successor unit, later named the 105th Field Artillery, was motorized in 1934, and the basement stables became garages. After many Guard units were consolidated in the mid-1980s, the New York State Division of Military and Naval Affairs ended its jurisdiction over the building in 1988. By 1992 the city's Human Resources Administration was running the armory as a shelter for homeless New Yorkers.

    “…in 1988 the New York State Division of Military & Naval Affairs ended its jurisdiction over the building.”

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

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