The Second Floor
What surprises most visitors to the armory is the enormous gym on the second floor. Originally a giant classroom and the drill deck, it is now a basketball court. As a classroom, the floor was made of maple. Desks once stretched from the South side of the drill deck. Communications connectors are still visible in the walls.
Built on the sides of the court are modular classrooms. The modular classrooms were built in stages, not during a specific year. Rooms have been designated different purposes at different times.
Today, the two largest rooms contain weight lifting and cardio equipment for the service members who serve at the armory. Aside from a gym equipment storage room, the other rooms remain as classrooms.
The gym floor features a Marines and a Navy side, a version of the logo for the armory, and the remains of adhesives which showed outlines of the U.S.S. Indiana (Battleship), U.S.S. Indianapolis (Cruiser), U.S.S Indianapolis (Submarine), and another ship unknown to the author. These adhesives were probably put on the floor in the 1980's, and became too difficult to recognize in the early 2000's. Outlines of the ships are still visible, if one knows what they are looking at.
Just above the gym floor, bleachers overlook the drill deck on the East side of the gym. From the bleachers, one can see the crow's nests set up on the opposite wall, just above a balcony that served as a platform for signalmen to
flash semaphore and Morse code, and was probably used as a mock bridge in simulations, replacing the original bridge located on the Northwest corner of the same floor. A computer simulator was installed in a small office on the gym floor level in 1983, a marvel in computing power at the time. This allowed for up to 16 battle simulations to be run simultaneously. Sound powered telephones once ran throughout the building, including to the computer simulation room and mock bridge. Using these assets, it was easy to train for emergencies and battle tactics.
Underneath the mock bridge, a wooden panel now separates the gym from the offices behind. The offices were not always partitioned as offices. As featured on the front page of a 1938 newspaper, the space was once the home of a deck gun.
Also located on the second floor is the conference room where the Heslar Naval Armory Board once met to discuss the future and the operations of the armory. It's not likely that this area was ever changed much. The classrooms on the same side, however, were once split in half. With so many classrooms, it's easy to see how the armory once turned out hundreds of trained sailors with each division.
Captain Heslar was an accomplished signalman as an enlisted man. As an officer, he wished to be close to the training that was occurring, so he added the office for the commanding officer on the second floor. Almost next door to his office, he also planned for the ward room to be built.
Today, the Sea Cadets use the former ward room as a supply storage. What was once Captain Heslar's office is the upper exit to the unusable damage control simulator. More often than not, this portion of the building is vacant, a possible glimpse into the future of the armory.
The rotunda portion of the building on the second floor was originally a library. One can only speculate what publications were contained in it. Because transient sailors stayed at the armory, it's possible that it contained newspapers and magazines which covered the progress of the war in addition to publications on communications theory, procedures, and the likes.