What's particularly sad to me about about the fact that Fort Constitution is being permitted to slide into decrepitude is that it's one of extremely few Second System forts that one can still point at today and say, "Hey, a Second System fort!"

Not that there were a whole lot of forts built during the Second System (roughly 1808 to 1816) anyway, but many of those that were built during this period, such as Fort Moultrie at Charleston Harbor in South Carolina, and Fort Wood at what would become Liberty Island in New York, had so much further improvement (or in the case of Fort Wood, a giant statue of a green lady) added to them as time went on, very little of their Second System character was left. Not so with much of Fort Constitution: Most of the western wall, bastions and main gate, all the way back to the Civil War-era fortifications, is Second System. And it's being allowed to rot.