Ellis Island

Or should I say, “Act of War Island”.

 After a brief visit to Liberty Park in December 2009, I made it back again recently, and was actually able to visit the island, along with Liberty Island, which features – you guessed it – the Statue of Liberty.

Background Part I.  After using Castle Cardens on the south tip of Manhattan for some time, the influx of immigrants to the US became too much, so Ellis Island was developed into a full immigration processing center in 1892, with the main building coming online around 1900.   This continued until 1954, when the whole complex was shut down and deteriorated over several decades.  Starting in the 70s it was renovated into the large and impressive museum we see now.

Ferry.   I took the ferry from the Liberty Park, close by to Jersey City in New Jersey, but there’s another ferry from Manhattan.  The ferry terminal is actually the former railroad station (long deactivated).   The train tracks are still here, but the sheds are NOT restored, except for signs indicating where the trains used to go from each track.  Anyone processed from Ellis Island who didn’t plan on staying in the NYC area would take their departing train from here.

After stopping at Ellis Island, the ferry goes on to Liberty Island, and then returns to the ferry terminal at Liberty Park.   You can stay on the ferry or get off.  They depart every 45 minutes.   You could – as I did – process Liberty Island in that span of time, but Ellis Island could accommodate that only if you were fairly brisk about enjoying the museum.  I took my time.

Background Part II.   As Ben Carson could tell you, many “immigrants” came on slave ships.   Most Japanese and Chinese came to America on the Pacific Coast, and there was a similar facility, Alcatraz – sorry, Angel Island – outside San Francisco to process immigrants coming across the Pacific.

This means that as a practical matter, most immigrants coming through Ellis Island were from Europe.  In other words, mostly white Americans whose relatives came here around the turn of the century, will be the people most interested in what Ellis Island was all about.

I have no native American blood in me, so far as I know.  Nor did any relatives come from Africa earlier than 50-100,000 years ago (the experts are still debating when).  My father’s mother is of English origin, and that quarter came to the US before the American Revolution.   My father’s father is of Polish origin, but was born in the US in 1898.   With Ellis Island opening in 1892, I have NO CLUE if that quarter came through Ellis Island, though it is possible.

However, both grandparents on my mother’s side came from Russian Poland – Lomza, to be exact.  Their port of entry?  New York in 1905.  BINGO.  

Main Building.   This has four towers and certainly looks like a late nineteenth century building.  The main hall has a large exhibit hall on the northern side, opposite the main entrance and ferry dock on the southern side.  Upstairs on the second and third floors are more exhibit halls.  There are lots of pictures and tons of descriptions.  Essentially all immigration from 1492 to the present is chronicled somewhere in this building, with lots of artifacts, costumes, and personal effects, and an excellent narrative of practically every part of the processing experience.  Some of the text has a somewhat overapologetic feel to it – probably offensive to the Make America Great Again crowd, but acceptable to the rest of us. 

Selective admission.  Notwithstanding the millions who came to the US, the authorities didn’t just let everyone in.  There was a whole slew of tests to pass before someone would be allowed to leave Ellis Island and live in America: medical and mental exams, quarantines, background checks, you name it.  The pre-INS/Customs can and did send you back if they thought you were (A) criminal, (B) idiot, (C) lazy dumbass who would mooch off everyone else, (D) diseased, or otherwise undesirable.  Muslim or Mexican were not disqualifiers.  Since the shipping company which brought you here would have to send you back at their cost, they did some screening beforehand to try to weed out the losers.   Sadly, some families were split up, and some parents sent unaccompanied children, some of whom never saw their parents again.

The mother-in-law of a former girlfriend had a particularly difficult and sad story, although Ellis Island is only tangentially related thereto.  She (MIL) was just a very young girl, about 4 years old, when she came to New York with her mother in the 1920s. The father, back in Germany, had died already.  The mother died of pneumonia, leaving the girl all alone in the apartment with the mother’s corpse on the bed.  Only a few days later did anyone else realize what had happened, and saved this poor girl.

Anyhow.

There’s actually a genealogical department on site, with databases, if you were inclined to do research there on the spot.  Had I had access to my paternal grandfather’s birth certificate, I may have been inclined to do so.   As you might expect, there’s also a gift shop, well stocked in fridge magnets but no pint glasses.  

  

Liberty Island.  Very close by is Liberty Island, with the Statue of Liberty on a massive pedestal (built up on what used to be Fort Wood).  The view is pretty nice from there:  lower Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, and Staten Island.  Its close proximity to Ellis Island means that ships coming to Ellis Island, passing between Long Island and Staten Island – the VNB only erected after Ellis Island closed – would see the Statue of Liberty, built in 1886, to the left of Manhattan.

Inside the pedestal is a museum – not very large – which describes the process of building the statue.  Apparently it was built in Paris near Parc Monceau, where we used to live, then disassembled, shipped in pieces, and reassembled on the pedestal, IKEA style.   The original idea, conceived by Edouard de Laboulaye, was to commemorate the 100 year anniversary of 1776 with a statue, which was designed by Frederic Auguste Bartholdhi.  Due to problems, it was not done until 1886, with help from the famous Gustave Eiffel (yes, the tower dude – that was done in 1889) who designed the iron framework inside the statue, her skeleton.   President Grover Cleveland presided over the opening.  By the 1980s it was in poor shape, so Lee Iacocca and Ronald Reagan rebuilt her by hand.  Thank you.

Long story short, both are well worth visiting, particularly if your own ancestors came to America that way.   I enjoyed my visit.