Ellis Island National Monument

Seventeen million people entered the United States between 1892 and 1954 by passing through the immigration station on Ellis Island, the largest formal gateway to America. Today more than 40 percent of all living Americans can trace their roots to an ancestor who came this way. While the Statue of Liberty beckoned people to America's shores with her symbolic promises of freedom and a better life, Ellis Island embodied the reality of immigration during its second great wave from 1901 to 1914. The hopefuls who came Italy, Africa, and the French West Indies had their first taste of America at the island as they went through the somewhat tormenting and certainly bewildering process of acceptance.

Officially closed by the government in 1954, and abandoned for years after, Ellis Island deteriorated under the combined forces of nature and vandals. Considered surplus property after its closing, the General Services Administration tried to sell it, first to the state governments of New York and New Jersey and later to private developers. These efforts failed because offers came in lower than the appraised value. Furthermore, the prospect of selling the historic landmass to a private developer for commercial purposes was considered "cheap and tawdry" by many who were in favor of setting it aside as a memorial to America's immigrants.

The Guastavino tile ceiling in the Great Hall during renovation
Photo c1987 Nick Cerulli

Fortunately, the idea of acknowledging the importance of Ellis Island in the immigrant saga of America prevailed, and in the fall of 1990 the Ellis Island Museum will open within the restored Main Building on the island.

Originally a tiny island of 3.5 acres of slush, sand, and oyster shells in the New York Harbor, Ellis Island grew as need dictated to its present size of 27.5 man-made acres housing a complex of 33 buildings. Much of the landfill for the island came from the ballast of immigrant ships and materials excavated during construction of the New York subway system.

In 1892 the first federal immigration station opened on Ellis Island and was enthusiastically described in Harper's Weekly as

looking "like a latter-day watering place hotel." Five years later fire destroyed the wooden structures and people were relieved for the buildings had deteriorated rapidly to a "row of unsightly, ramshackle tinderboxes."

An architectural competition was held in September 1897, among the first under the Tarnsey Act, and a contract was awarded to the New York firm of Boring & Tilton in December 1897 for the design of the new Ellis Island Immigration Station. The government's design program called for a fireproof structure to accommodate the processing of 5,000 immigrants a day (up to 8,000 in an emergency). The main problem the architects had to address was circulation- -people needed to be processed with a minimum of confusion and delay as to avoid overnight stays.

Designed to accommodate no more than 500,000 immigrants a year, the station was soon hopelessly overcrowded with yearly totals in the 700,000 range. The record high for Ellis Island was in 1907 when 1,004,756 immigrants passed through its doors. The numbers dropped off in 1914 with the beginning of World War I and remained low until the end of the war. With the "Red Scare" haunting the country, the U.S. Congress passed legislation in 1921 to check the rising tide of postwar immigration.

The Main Building was designed in the French Renaissance style and composed of brick laid in Flemish bond and trimmed with limestone and granite "boasting quoins, rustification, and splendid belvederes." Triple-arch entrances that rose well into the second story marked the east and west sides in a grand style. Both Boring and Tilton attended the Ecole des Beaux Arts which may explain the influence of the French Renaissance style on the project. An analysis in Architectural Record (1902) pointed out the "bloated" character of the detailing and reasoned that the heavy handedness of the facade along with the chromatic scheme made the building easier to read from a distance, appropriate for one situated on an island in a busy harbor. The immense reception and inspection center was 388 feet long and 164 feet wide with heights of 57 feet to the balustrade and 126 feet to the dome finials.

Upon entering the building, immigrants mounted stairs leading to the second-floor Great Hall which served as the waiting and processing room. A room impressive for its size- - 189 feet long and 102 feet wide with a 60-foot-high vaulted ceiling- -and the abundance of large windows in the east and west walls. The stairs leading to the Great Hall served as a medical treadmill. Doctors waited at the top to check the breathing, posture, gait, and general physical fitness of people as they made the climb. For many the stairs took on a special meaning, for those feeble from sickness or old age could be marked for rejection at that point.

The Main Building also included administrative offices, a baggage room, railway and telegraph offices, and money changing stalls, as well as dormitories with 600 beds, a dining hall, kitchen facilities, and showers. Other buildings included a laundry, power plant, hospital, prison, and a dock. The final cost in 1902 of the new Ellis Island Immigration Station was 1.5 million.

While the Main Building and the station as a whole evolved and expanded over the years, one of the most notable additions was to the Great Hall. In July 1916, an explosion occurred on Black Tom Island, a loading facility just a few hundred yards off Ellis Island, where munitions destined for Germany were loaded on barges and

Drawing of the Main Building by Boring and Tilton, Architects
National Archives

railroad cars. Though no one was seriously injured or killed, the blast did cause $400,000 in structural damages. As part of the repairs, the Guastavino Brothers installed a new tile ceiling over the Great Hall.

The work of the Guastavino Brothers is well represented in buildings constructed during the first quarter of the 1900s in New York, Grand Central Station's Oyster Bar and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and across the country. The Guastavino's technique and materials are derived from Moors or older antecedents and perfected in the mid-nineteenth century. The basic idea is to build a thin dome or vault of more-or-less flat ceramic tiles in two or three overlapping layers laminated with a carefully proportioned quick-drying "cohesive" Portland cement. The amazing part is that nothing else in the way of additional support--no steel, no reinforcements, and usually not even a scaffold during construction.

In the Great Hall, creamy white tiles are set in a herringbone pattern, distinctive to the Guastavinos, and aside from being beautiful, the vaulted tile ceiling is both fireproof and exceptionally strong. In the course of the current restoration, the ceiling only needed seventeen new tiles out of 28,282.

General repairs, new construction, and landscaping were done on Ellis Island during the 1930s by the Works Progress Administration. The construction of a new fireproof ferryhouse in Art Deco style was one of the most interesting improvements, long with the creation of a large mural, Role of the Immigrant in Industrial America, (1935-36) by Edward Lanning, in he dining hall of the Main Building. The ferryhouse still stands but awaits attention as do many other buildings on Ellis Island. The mural was removed in he 1960s and reinstalled in a Brooklyn courthouse, but hopefully will be returned to Ellis Island to provide another record of the contributions made by immigrants.

Ellis Island was designated part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument in 1965, administered by the National Park Service of the Department of Interior. Funds for the restoration of both Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty are being raised Privately by the Statue of Liberty Ellis Island Foundation, set up in 1982 by Lee Iacocca at the request of President Ronald Reagan. Funds are still being raised to meet the cost of the restoration, estimated at $150 million, and the centennial celebration in 1992.

Today's visitors to Ellis Island, although unencumbered by bundled possessions and the harrowing memory of a transatlantic journey, retrace the steps of twelve million immigrants who approached America's "front doors to freedom" in the early twentieth century. Ellis Island receives today's arriving ferry passengers as it did hundreds of thousands of new arrivals between 1897 and 1938. In place of the business-like machinery of immigration inspection, the restored Main Hall now houses the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, dedicated to commemorating the immigrants' stories of trepidation and triumph, courage and rejection, and the lasting image of the American dream.

During its peak years-1892 to 1924 Ellis Island received thousands of immigrants a day. Each was scrutinized for disease or disability as the long line of hopeful new arrivals made their way up the steep stairs to the great, echoing Registry Room. Over 100 million Americans can trace their ancestry in the United States to a man, woman, or child whose name passed from a steamship manifest sheet to an inspector's record book in the great Registry Room at Ellis Island.

With restrictions on immigration in the 1920s Ellis Island's population dwindled, and the station finally closed its doors in 1954. Its grand brick and limestone buildings gradually deteriorated in the fierce weather of New York Harbor. Concern about this vital part of America's immigrant history led to the inclusion of Ellis Island as part of Statue of Liberty National Monument in 1965. Private citizens mounted a campaign to preserve the Island, and one of the most ambitious restoration projects in American history returned Ellis Island's Main Building to its former grandeur in September, 1990.

Restoration of Ellis Island's Main Building was the most extensive of any single building in the United States. Often compared to the refurbishment of Versailles in France, the project took eight years to complete at a cost of 156 million dollars. Opened September 10, 1990, the Ellis Island Immigration Museum is New York City's fourth largest and receives almost two million visitors annually-twice as many as entered here in 1907, Ellis Island's peak immigration year. The Immigration Museum's five permanent exhibits contain 5,000 artifacts and hundreds of photographs which trace the history of Ellis Island and the story of American immigration. The museum also incorporates the American Immigrant Wall of Honor®, a listing of over five hundred thousand immigrants' names. From anarchist (Emma Goldman) to pianist Irving Berlin), from mobster ("Lucky" Luciano) to mayor (New York's Abraham Beame), and from inventor (Igor Sikorsky) to film star (Rudolph Valentino), immigrants added the threads of their lives, whether good or bad, to the nation's fabric. Over 100 million Americans, some forty percent of the country's population, can trace their ancestry in the United States to a man, woman, or child who passed from a steamship to a ferry to the inspection lines in the great Registry Room at Ellis Island. Not surprisingly, the General Services Administration described Ellis Island as "one of the most famous landmarks in the world" when it tried to sell the island as surplus Federal property in the 1950s. Along with a chunk of history, the buyer would receive thirty-five buildings, two huge water tanks, the ferryboat Ellis Island, thousands of feet of chain link fence left over from the island days as an enemy and alien detention center. Advertised in numerous newspapers, the island drew dozens of prospective bids. Suggestions included an atomic research center, gambling casino, an amusement park, a slaughterhouse, a womens prison, and "the perfect city of tomorrow." No bid was high enough, however, and no sale was made. The doors remained locked, the buildings empty. For ten years Ellis Island stood vacant, subject to vandals and looters who made off with anything they could carry, from doorknobs to filing cabinets. The building's Beaux-Arts copper ornamentation deteriorated. Snow swirled through broken windows, roofs leaked, and weeds sprang up in corridors, growing in the footprints of anxious immigrants long gone. Ellis Island was forgotten, swallowed by the fierce weather of New York Harbor. In October of 1964 Stewart Udall, Secretary of the Interior for President Lyndon Johnson, visited Ellis Island and recognized it as a vital part of America's heritage. Udall urged President Johnson to rescue the island and preserve a piece of America's past by placing the island in the permanent care of the National Park Service. Ellis Island became part of Statue of Liberty National Monument in 1965. Rebuilding the seawall - to keep the island's landfill from slipping into the harbor - became the first preservation task. Congress appropriated one million dollars for

its upkeep. Yet Ellis Island remained a magnificent wreck. In 1976 the dilapidated Main Building opened to the public, and more than fifty thousand visitors a year toured the historic site until the island again closed in 1984. Public awareness and concern over Ellis Island's disrepair had inspired private citizens to mount a campaign to save what was left of its buildings. The Statue of Liberty/Ellis Island Foundation was created in 1982 in an effort to restore both monuments, and in the early 1980s, funded by private donations, work began on Ellis Island. Although the Main Building's foundations were in sound condition, its interior walls had sucked up harbor moisture like a sponge. Ceilings had collapsed; walls crumbled at the touch. Some thirty thousand square feet of rotting wooden floors were torn up. To dry the building out engineers used huge generator-powered furnaces to pump warm air through thousands of feet of flexible tubing strung throughout the building's rooms-a process which took over two years. During this time, restoration crews took inventory of everything in the Main Building-from radiators and toilets to sinks and electric fans-in an attempt to use as many original fixtures as possible. The Main Building's Registry Room, which had been the principal waystation for most immigrants processed at Ellis Island, provided a benchmark for restoration. The time period from 1918-1924 was selected as it coincided with the construction date of the Hall's 56-foot high barrel-vaulted ceiling and peak immigration years.

The Registry Room's original plaster ceiling had been severely damaged in 1916 by the explosion of munition barges set afire by German saboteurs on New Jersey's Black Tom Wharf, a mile away. The ceiling was rebuilt in 1917 by Rafael Guastavino, a Spanish immigrant who had arrived with his little boy in the United States in 1881. Guastavino also brought with him ancient Catalonian building techniques, and together he and his son developed a self-supporting system of interlocking terra-cotta tiles that proved light, strong, fireproof, and economical. During the Registry Room's restoration, when the ceiling was inspected and cleaned, only seventeen of the 28,832 tiles originally set by the Guastavinos had to be replaced. As restoration progressed, workers discovered graffiti left by the immigrants, hidden beneath successive layers of paint on the building's walls. Scratched into the original plaster were names and initials, dating from 1900 to 1954, accompanied by poems, portraits, religious symbols, and cartoons of birds, flowers, and people. Some images were written in pencil, others in the blue chalk the medical inspectors used. Also inscribed were words of heartache. "Damned is the day I left my homeland," wrote one Italian hand, and in Greek sad and angry fingers scrawled, "Blast you America with your much money who took the Greeks away from their race." To save these telling accounts of the immigrants' frustration, joy, and perseverance, a fine arts conservator used methods developed to preserve the frescoes of Italy.

Workers also focused on restoring the Main Building's exterior. Years of exposure had painted it black with soot and the dirt of pollution. The building's granite foundation washed clean with a solution of chemicals and water, and high-pressure steam jets polished its delicate limestone trim. The National Park Service's 1978 study of the Main Building revealed that only fifty percent of the original copper ornamentation remained in place. Using surviving pieces as models, workers replaced the cornices and cupolas that had disappeared or deteriorated. New copper domes, installed piece by piece, were crowned with spires placed by helicopter. Today's visitors are still awed by their trip through Ellis Island. Freshly minted, the tiled and turreted Main Building still welcomes with a grand gesture. The Immigration Museum's exhibits educate rather than intimidate-and open the eyes of visitors to the complex and often contradictory emotions immigrants felt when they arrived on America's shores. Ellis Island symbolized America's majesty, but also its willingness to reject the unwanted. As immigrants continue to flow into the United States, Ellis Island speaks not only of past promises, but also of the future.