Cold War Gothic at The End

If you are like me, you have a taste for mid-century public works, especially those built for national security and inspired by paranoia. On the eastern most point of Long Island, New York, 120 miles from Manhattan, is the Camp Hero State Park on Montauk, Point. Camp Hero had many surveillance and defense roles throughout World War II and the Cold War, part of which generated its own conspiracy theory, known as the Montauk Project.

Montauk Point has been a place of interest for the military since George Washington authorized the lighthouse there in 1792. Montauk falls strategically between New York City and Boston. The point juts out with the vantage of Long Island Sound, three states’ coastlines and the boat traffic heading from the ocean to the cities of New London and Groton, Connecticut, homes of a Navy submarine base and a submarine manufacturer, respectively.

During World War II Camp Hero was armed with 16’’ naval rifles intended for German battleships. The installation was disguised as a New England fishing village to counter the threat of spy craft. Such a threat arrived on June 13th, 1942 when eight German spies landed down the coast in Amagansett. The spies were from Operation Pastorius, a sabotage mission to take out major infrastructure around the U.S. The mission failed, as one of the spies turned himself in to the FBI and the rest were apprehended.

When the War War II ended, Camp Hero transitioned to meet a new threat of Soviet bombers armed with nuclear weapons. Now that attack was expected from above, the Air Force took over the facility and modernized it into the iconic Cold War specter we know today.

In 1958, the Air Force installed a SAGE radar system, featuring the AN-FPS-35 radar spanning 126 feet, manufactured by the Long Island based Sperry Gyroscope Company. It is the only radar of its kind presently standing. The radar was designed to detect air attack from 200 miles away, and was part of the far-reaching early detection network of NORAD. All data was sent from Montauk to another facility in Hancock Field in Syracuse, New York. The radar used frequency diversity to evade electronic counter measures, and at the time was advanced because of that capability. However, as the Space Age produced superior surveillance, the radar became obsolete in the 1970’s. The installation was closed in 1980.



A visit to Camp Hero, now Camp Hero State Park, is like a picnic at all those other decommissioned post-war military facilities of your youth. Here is a table to have sandwich, and there is a fence with a boarded up structure behind it. The woodsy color scheme of the park’s placards communicate “family fun in nature”, but the “Do Not Enter Building” stenciled across the subterranean hatch door, and the, “Danger, Live Ordnance-If Found Do Not Touch, Contact Police” posted on the hiking trail, keep everyone on their toes. These warnings signs are the hieroglyphs on the ruins of the Nuclear Era-artifacts that tell the histories of what went on here.


The warren of paved roads and footpaths in the park meanders through a dense coastal forest of hardwood trees, a maritime arboretum by default, thanks to the military. The sylvan surroundings contrast with the haunted industrial relics hiding about. Without warning a path in the woods will dead end in front of a boxy concrete-block building, or later, open up to a circular pad in the ground where a gun platform sat. Make your way down one of these paths and you will walk along the bluffs overlooking the expanse of the Atlantic. You arrive at the beach and behind you, sticking up out the woods is the rusting sentry on its concrete lookout, mummified but still watching.