The students from the upstate New York school’s Historic Preservation and Planning Masters…
By Kathianne Boniello
About 40 Cornell University students descended on Bayside’s Fort Totten this weekend, prepared to do battle with their ultimate adversary: the ravages of time.
The students from the upstate New York school’s Historic Preservation and Planning Masters program volunteered their time to help rescue historic buildings at the Civil War-era fort and get the land ready for use as a city park later this year.
So it became a weekend of sawing and sanding, scraping and painting under the watchful eye of the city Parks Department’s Historic House Trust for the volunteers. Their efforts focused mostly on repairing the front porch of a 1905 building once used as to house Army officers.
Sue Shutte, who along with fellow student Trina Meiser organized the volunteer project, said undertakings like the Totten restoration work were just what the students were looking for.
“This is what we’re going to school for, so to get that hands-on experience is really great,” Shutte said as she repaired part of the newly painted railing on the building’s porch. “We wanted to have something we’d be able to make a difference on.”
The difference was easy to discern: bright white paint gleamed from among the rotting sections of porch railings that the students were slowly replacing, and old, peeling paint betraying years of neglect were scraped away.
Fort Totten, decommissioned by the U.S. Army in 1995, was to be taken over by the city this year and split between the Fire and Parks departments. To help care for the buildings, several nonprofits were asked to take interim leases at the fort at that time.
But while nonprofit groups like the Bayside Historical Society and the Queens Women’s Center have renovated their respective headquarters at the Fort, not all the structures have gotten the same care.
Meiser said the students originally wanted to restore the 1850 farmhouse near the 1905 structure they eventually chose, but the building — which has been collapsing for years — was too unsafe to work on.
The volunteers ran into some limitations on the 1905 building as well, Meiser said.
“We can’t work on the second floor,” she said, pointing to the two- level building with large wrap-around porches on each floor. The second floor was deemed unstable, restricting volunteers to the ground floor porch.
“We hope the cleaning will bring attention to it and public support” for future restoration efforts, Meiser said. “This just scratches the surface.”
Ben Haavik, acting director of the Historic House Trust, said the Parks Department never turns down volunteer help.
“Volunteer work is an amazing way to get work done,” said Haavik, who said Parks Department workers also did work on the fort this weekend. “It’s always so hard to find funding to do this kind of work. It gives us the time we need to fund-raise.”
Reach reporter Kathianne Boniello by e-mail at Timesledgr@aol.com or call 229-0300, Ext. 146.
