Feeling America’s promise and perseverance on a trip to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty
If you’re a white guy on a tourist ferry in New York Harbor, and the Statue of Liberty looms above, it’s easy to see her as the foremost symbol of immigration in the U.S., perhaps in the world. You look at her face, then you glance at the ferry’s next stop — Ellis Island, where more than 12 million European immigrants arrived between 1892 and 1924.
Without those huddled incoming masses and their sons and daughters, the U.S. wouldn’t be what it is.
But every year this immigrant history and America’s population drift a little farther apart. These days, about seven Latin Americans and Asians become U.S. citizens for every one European. If you do a Google image search for “immigration symbol,” you’ll see the Southern California running-family freeway sign two or three times before the first Lady Liberty.
Series: Celebrating our national parks »
Ellis Island, once the arrival station for million of immigrants from Europe, is now the site of a National Park Service museum that tells the story of all U.s. immigrants, before, during and after Ellis Island’s busiest days from the 1890s to the 1920s. Ellis Island, which sits in New York Harbor near the Statue of Liberty and Lower Manhattan, is part of Statue of Liberty National Monument.
Ellis Island, once the arrival station for million of immigrants from Europe, is now the site of a National Park Service museum that tells the story of all U.s. immigrants, before, during and after Ellis Island’s busiest days from the 1890s to the 1920s. Ellis Island, which sits in New York Harbor near the Statue of Liberty and Lower Manhattan, is part of Statue of Liberty National Monument.
See more videos
But the easiest, most rewarding way to see what’s happening with immigration — and remind yourself about what was happening 100 years ago – may be to get off the ferry at Ellis Island and step into the first big brick building you see.
That’s the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration, expanded last year to look more broadly at “the peopling of America.” The new wing examines immigration since federal officials declared Ellis Island surplus property in 1954. The museum added the “national” to its name last year too.
“People were saying, ‘This is a great museum, but my story is not told here,’” said Peg Zitko, executive vice president of the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, which raised $20 million to pay for the museum revamp. “We’re really finally telling the entire story.… There’s really no other museum in America that does that.”
Her brow is resolute, as if hardened by innumerable Yankee losses. Her right arm is aloft, as if waving for the Uber guy. And her feet — they’re a ladies’ size 879, rangers like to say.
Even if you’re hazy about who is allowed to go where inside the Statue of Liberty, you know this landmark well….
Her brow is resolute, as if hardened by innumerable Yankee losses. Her right arm is aloft, as if waving for the Uber guy. And her feet — they’re a ladies’ size 879, rangers like to say.
Even if you’re hazy about who is allowed to go where inside the Statue of Liberty, you know this landmark well….
(Chris Reynolds)
These are challenging stories to tell. And as national park units go, Ellis Island is in its infancy. Although the Statue of Liberty National Monument has been run by the National Park Service since 1933, Ellis Island was added to the monument only in 1965. At that point it was a ghostly, deeply deteriorated landscape.
For years, few tourists were allowed. Even now, much of the 27½-acre island is off-limits unless you sign on for one of the Save Ellis Island organization’s hard-hat tours of unrestored buildings, including the infectious and contagious disease ward; the kitchen; and the mortuary and autopsy room.
Most visitors, however, head for the island’s stately, red-brick Main Building, built in 1900, then reborn as a museum in 1990.
On the way in, I did hear one mom warn her young child that “this is not as glamorous as the Statue of Liberty.” But I also met Robert and Lisa Marie Spillane of Aylesbury, England, who had planned to spend three hours at the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Instead, absorbed by the stories of trauma and triumph, they’d spent seven.
“Wall Street and the Museum of American Finance will have to wait,” said Robert.
Inside the Main Building, visitors work their way through dozens of galleries filled with historic photos — many larger-than-life faces with disarming stares — along with artifacts and multimedia displays on topics such as shipboard life, class distinctions and health conditions. Ledgers show how, in the peak years of 1910-1914, as many as 10,000 immigrants a day passed through.
Italy sent the most immigrants, followed by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Russian Empire and the German Empire. After laws were tightened in 1924, U.S. consulates took over most processing and traffic through Ellis slowed to a trickle.
The Baggage Room, where visitors enter, once focused mostly on how immigrants’ possessions were handled a century ago. Now a talking globe illustrates global migrations and an electronic Flag of Faces highlights American diversity.
Upstairs, the Great Hall feels like a rail station with plenty of people but no trains. You can almost hear the echo of foreign languages from long ago. (Of course, that might be the sound of tourists; audio tours are in nine languages.)
The building’s old railroad ticket office now is devoted to pre-1890 Americans, including those whose territory was taken; Africans who were forced into slavery and shipped to North America in the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries; the Irish driven here by famine in the 1840s; and the Chinese who arrived in the 1860s and 1870s.
As a white guy with an Asian American family, I paid special attention to the events of 1882. That year, while the Statue of Liberty was still under construction, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first American law to turn immigrants away on the basis of nationality. (White Westerners, tired of competing for jobs with Chinese immigrants, pushed hard for it.) Later, San Francisco Bay’s Angel Island Immigration Station processed Asian immigrants from 1910 to 1940. It’s now Angel Island State Park.
The exhibits in the pre-Ellis area are handsome and full of data, but how do you tell all the stories that need telling? Ernest Sims, an African American who was visiting from Pittsburgh, told me he would have liked more attention paid to the slave trade. If you arrived as a slave from Africa, he said, “You were here without a choice.”
As for immigration since 1945, those rooms are toward the end of a hallway that some visitors miss. There are video profiles of five immigrant communities (including the Chinese Americans of Monterey Park). There’s a discussion of the bracero program, which brought Mexican workers north legally from the 1940s through the 1960s, and a section addressing illegal immigration.
Though particulars vary, “the reason immigrants came here 100 years ago is the reason immigrants come here today,” Ellis Island ranger Dave McCutcheon told me.
I was still in the modern immigration wing when I met visitor Armando Marrero, who was frowning. “What do Central and South America have to do with Ellis Island? This is not correct at all,” said Marrero, a New Jersey resident with Puerto Rican roots. Immigration from Europe and from the Americas are such different subjects, Marrero said, that they require separate treatment.
Leave a Reply