Day 21 - Ellis Island

It's embarrassing, but I hadn't been here, yet... in a City that is 36% foreign-born.

As probably everyone else already knows, this spit of land played perhaps the central role in one of the largest migrations in all of human history. In the course of about 60 years beginning in 1892, more than 12 million poor people moved through the vaulted, Gustavino-tiled Great Hall here in their quests--real or imagined--to take part in the grandeur that was America. The Great Hall was the dynamo of a human factory. In a single year, 1907, over 1,000,000 souls move into and out of this chamber. The single busiest day saw a staggering 11,000 waddling, huddled men, women and children funneled in from ferries and steamships, circulated through various veins of bureaucracy and cavalier clinical reviews radiating from the hall, and then disgorged again. On a typical day, more than 98% would move further on toward their dreams. The rest remanded or returned for a variety of reasons, some capricious. Despite the room's heft, the strength conveyed by the smoothly hewn stone columns and tiled walls, it's not hard to imagine groaning sounds coming not from the masses inside, but from the building itself under the strain--of shear numbers, of weariness and of hope.

For those coming to this country in steerage (first- and second-class passengers moved through customs and immigration dockside in Manhattan), this was the third and perhaps only the penultimate leg of their journeys. Most started in small, destitute rural hinterlands in Europe, traveling on foot, by wagon or railroad to a port; booked passage on a steamer to New York that might take a week or a month depending on the storms of the North Atlantic, arriving at a passenger terminal on the Hudson River; were moved out of steerage and onto ferries for Ellis Island and then back onto those same ferries to return to the rail terminals along the Hudson if they were traveling further west (a surprising number were). Or, if they were making a go of it in NYC, they were dropped off at the Battery where they might finally be greeted by eagerly anticipating friends or loved ones. Or not.

The museum on Ellis Island has an impressive collection of paper, ephemera and photographs of what they call The Immigrant Experience. And it is extensive. One item which I was transfixed by is a mural-like collage of scenes of folk artist Ralph Fasanella's memories of his childhood as part of an immigrant family in Family Supper. It reminds me of Faith Ringgold's quilts and paintings. And the building itself was impressively restored in the mid-1980s, in time for the Statue of Liberty's centennial.

Ellis Island is an impressive monument to what the human will can undertake--traveling half-way around the world for weeks with little more than their family and a suitcase (sometimes empty and carried just for appearance) in wretchedly degrading conditions that surely must have been worse than what they were leaving behind for something better than they had. All of my family was on Staten Island by the time Ellis Island opened in 1892 so I can't trace an of my ancestry through it, and I'm a little sad about it.