Naval Reserve Armory

Bristol's mightiest building, this armory was built for the local Naval Reserve Torpedo Company, a division of the Rhode Island Militia. Its construction is itself a history of the changing fortunes of the Bristol harbor. It dominates Warehouse Point, at the southern end of the port, and was originally developed in 1810 as Long Wharf, a bold speculative venture which involved five brick warehouses. Within eighty years, the complex had been demolished, and this stupdendous Richardsonian essay took its place. Built of random-coursed granite ashlar, heavily rusticated, and rising to a defiant machicolated cornice, it is a familiar type among America's armories of the late nineteenth century. But such buildings are almost always on landlocked urban sites, and to see an example—whose details derive from Italian palazzos—in a Venetian waterfront setting is oddly pleasing. The building was renovated by the WPA in the mid-1930s, although that work was interrupted by the hurricane of 1938, after which the building was decommissioned and acquired by the town.