It Has Been Used as Fort, Resort : Versatile Island to Star in Still Another Role

NEW YORK —  Governors Island is an apt setting for a meeting between the leaders of the world’s nuclear rivals--it bristles with fortifications never tested.

Two years ago the island was the center of the spectacular Liberty Weekend celebration, and today it will be the scene of a meeting between Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan and George Bush.

Just off Manhattan’s southern tip in New York Harbor, the 173-acre island is one of the nation’s oldest military installations and has been a Coast Guard base since 1966.

Over three centuries, Governors Island also has served as a quarantine station and a recruiting depot, a summer resort and a prison, an airfield and a race track, a pheasant preserve and a sheep farm. Until the Coast Guard arrived, it was an Army base.

Bought From Indians

Purchased from Indians by the Dutch in 1634, the island’s name stems from an act of the New York Assembly in 1698 that set it aside “for the benefit and accommodation of His Majesty’s Governors.”

The 1708 brick manor house where the colonial governors lived is the oldest building on the island, one of five on the National Register of Historic Places.

Historic buildings include Ft. Jay, a star-shaped fortress built in 1798; Castle Williams, which, along with a similar fort on Manhattan’s Battery, controlled the approach to the East River and discouraged a British attack on New York in the War of 1812, and the Admiral’s House, an imposing brick home with front and rear columned porticos that housed the likes of Gens. Winfield Scott, John J. Pershing and Omar Bradley.

The island has had less successful residents, including hundreds of Confederate prisoners during the Civil War.

Despite the martial atmosphere, the island has never seen combat, and each spring flowers sprout from the ground at the base of Ft. Jay’s cannons.

Today, Governors Island is the Coast Guard’s largest installation, a base from which it conducts operations halfway across the Atlantic.

Despite its location in the midst of the nation’s busiest harbor, a seven-minute ferry ride from Wall Street, Governors Island is also a sleepy service town of 4,000 residents, some of whom don’t bother to lock their doors.

Few Visitors Allowed

The island is open to public visits only two days a year, so Coast Guard personnel and their families have it all to themselves: the school, the bank and the only golf course with a Manhattan zip code.

The community center is the 16-lane bowling alley, which has its own Burger King--the only one in New York that serves beer.

“You can’t have a bowling alley without beer,” a base official once explained. “That’s un-American.”

A tape-recorded rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” is piped across the island each morning to mark the raising of the colors, and each evening “Retreat” is sounded as the flag is lowered.