Veterans Museum at Park Slope Armory is 'Best Kept Secret in Brooklyn' View Full Caption

PARK SLOPE — Most people know there's a YMCA inside the Park Slope Armory, and some are aware there's a women's homeless shelter there, too.

But few realize that the hulking building on Eighth Avenue and 15th Street is home to a veterans museum.

"We call it the best kept secret in Brooklyn," says museum director Tom Miskel as he throws open a door down the hall from the Armory's Eighth Avenue entrance to reveal a room packed with military artifacts.

A trio of mannequins decked out in Civil War uniforms stands at one end and display cases show off an array of relics, from World War II-era canteens to spent bullets fired from Confederate Army guns.

A storage cabinet holds a trove of old newspapers, including the Dec. 8, 1941, edition of the Los Angeles Times with the six-inch headline, "It's War!" On a shelf there's a pristine tin of "Civil Defense Survival Crackers" from 1962.

Miskel, a onetime president of the Park Slope Civic Council, wants to show off these treasures to a wider audience and he's on a mission to raise the museum's profile.

He recently started working with a photographer and a website manager to put the museum's collection online. He also wants to organize its hodgepodge holdings into exhibits about little-known chapters in military history, such as the black soldiers who served in WWI and female WWII pilots.

"We want to show people what we have — it's a piece of history that shouldn't be lost," said Miskel.

He doesn't talk about his own service in the U.S. Army in the late 1960s, but he delights in sharing nuggets of military history and the Armory with others.

The museum's collection now takes up about five rooms inside the sprawling Armory, and it continues to grow as local families clean out attics or donate items after the death of a veteran.

Veterans also sometimes stop in to share stories of their own connection to the Armory, which was built in 1895 as the headquarters of the National Guard's 14th Regiment. The building was a recruitment center and stored tanks and ammunition during WW II. At one point there was a "luxurious" officers' club on the second floor, Miskel said.

One recent visitor stopped in looking for his old discharge papers, Miskel said. The man had been drafted during the Korean War from Puerto Rico even though he didn't speak English. He broke into tears when he saw some of the Korean War artifacts in the museum's collection, Miskel said.

People also wander in occasionally to tell tales of the Armory's past — the building's colorful history is practically deserving of its own museum exhibit.

Deep below the YMCA workout rooms where moms do "baby and me" Pilates are subterranean tunnels that were once firing ranges. If you bring a flashlight, you can see bullet holes in metal arches on the tunnel ceilings.

The Armory once had an escape tunnel that troops could use to flee the building if necessary, but it's thought to be partially collapsed now and the exact entrance has been lost to time, Miskel said.

He's hoping that the museum will help preserve some of that quickly fading history before it's too late.

"Things have been forgotten," Miskel said. "People have become unaware. ... I want to get this place working so I can show it off."