Where America Came From : A Newly Restored Ellis Island Reminds Visitors That We Are All Refugees

My parents were not the adventurous type. They didn’t own a car, considered cabs reserved for medical emergencies, and treated the subway ride from Brooklyn to Manhattan as the equivalent of an ocean crossing. As to leaving New York City, or, God forbid, the state, you might as well be talking about a trip to the dark side of the moon.

Yet, as both my sister and I were acutely aware, our parents had crossed an ocean, had in fact made a journey whose Arabian Nights immensity we could barely imagine. An unsettling combination of hope and fear had led them to flee from their homes in Europe’s Pale of Settlement, the area of Western Russia where the czars confined their Jews. Both found places in steerage--my father, a teen-ager, traveled alone, while my mother, just shy of school age, went with her family--and, with a detour to Argentina for my father, both ended up in New York.

Yet not only did those journeys apparently kill the longing for further movement in both of them, they had also totally obliterated any desire on their part to talk about the experience they’d been through. True, a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty might cause my mother to reminisce about sleepily being taken on deck to see it when her ship entered New York harbor, but neither of them mentioned Ellis Island, the refugee’s first stop in this country, and I’d always wondered why.

Now, the place having reopened to the public in September as the Ellis Island Immigration Museum after eight years and a privately raised $156 million spent on renovations, I was in New York harbor myself, taking the short ride on a rickety Circle Line ferry that was all that stood between me and exploring the reasons for that silence. Going there made me feel surprisingly uneasy, as if I was returning to an ancestral home I’d never seen, one where I didn’t quite know what I’d find. For though my parents had come from Europe, I felt as if my life as an American had in a sense begun right there.

Ellis Island was the one experience the biggest portion of those who came to the United States had had in common. Between 1892 and 1924, some 12 million souls had entered America through this sturdy immigration station, easily the busiest in the nation. By 1910, 75% of the residents of New York, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and Boston were either immigrants or their children, and today some 100 million people, nearly half America’s population, trace their ancestry to someone who passed through Ellis’ gates.

Originally a three-acre mud flat best known for the hanging of traitors and pirates, Ellis passed to the control of the federal government in 1808 and gradually, through land fill, was enlarged to three connected islands covering 27.5 acres. A self-contained world just a stone’s throw from the Statue of Liberty, Ellis contained everything from a laundry and a dining room that sat 1,200 to a morgue and a hospital with wards for diseases running the gamut from contagious to psychiatric.

It is the island’s main building which has been restored, a circa 1900 limestone-and-brick beaux-arts structure distinguished by four 100-foot copper-domed towers. As the ferry docked where generations of immigrant ferries had before it, I got an immediate sense of what my parents must have felt, and it was a shock. For this dour, imposing structure, complete with fierce stone eagles, not only radiated the self-confidence of a country that felt sure it had all the answers, it also felt both frightening and authoritarian, the opposite of welcoming. If the Statue of Liberty had said, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free,” Ellis half a mile away had replied, “That’s fine for you, but over here they’d better stand in line if they know what’s good for them.”

The entrance canopy, a new glass and metal covering that coexists uneasily with the grand old building, leads directly into the former baggage room, where, appropriately enough, everyone mills around for a few moments, uncertain as to where to go first. The far part of the room, with wonderful picture windows facing Manhattan, has been turned from a railroad ticketing office to a statistic-and model-heavy exhibit about immigration history that is the most skipable part of the building.

Instead, pause a moment in front of a wonderful jumble of ancient baggage. A motley, colorful collection of trunks, carpet bags, sacks, and baskets have been piled one on top of the other. This exhibit that now calls to mind how Ellis looked in its heyday but also personalizes the place, reminds us that people with cares, hopes and too many linens came through these doors.

It is a reminder, actually, that is only partially necessary, because those who come to Ellis today, with their forebears clearly in mind, invariably pay the most careful attention to everything. If any museum in America actually means something to its visitors, this has got to be it.

To the right of the baggage, a set of stairs leads up to the imposing Registry Room. One hundred and sixty feet long and two stories high, its ceiling composed of 28,832 (you don’t have to count them, someone already did) Gustavino tiles glistening from the light pouring in through great half-circle windows, the magisterial Registry was the heart of the old Ellis as it is of the new.

Patiently sitting on small hard benches, new arrivals could glance out the window and try and draw hope from the sight of the Statue of Liberty as they waited for inspectors, who stood at high wooden lecterns like so many demanding schoolmasters, to call their numbers and subject them to a final cross-examination.

I felt I could almost feel my parents contrasting emotions here: anticipation, uncertainty, bewilderment, even fear. The very size of the place must have over-awed them as well, but their son, used to giant auditoriums and even bigger airports, was surprised to find how compact, how manageable it all seemed. How small a gate, I thought, for so many millions to pour through.

I should perhaps have felt a similar twinge of emotion on those stairs leading up from the baggage room, but I’d already read that they were brand-new, replacing but not duplicating long-gone originals. Though their presence breaks one of the rules of restoration, it was decided, and justly, that they had to be there, because it was on those stairs that the true nature of Ellis Island began to reveal itself to its subjects.

As explained in Through America’s Gate, an exceptionally thorough and totally fascinating exhibit located in refurbished office and medical examination space on the same floor as the Registry Room, the purpose of Ellis was in fact not to welcome but to exclude, to screen out the undesirables: the ill, the disabled, the criminal.

To tell single women that they could not leave the island with a man not related to them. To, at different times in our history, send back the politically and economically undesirable. To remove the hard cases too hot for even the melting pot to handle.

So canny medical inspectors stood on the top of those stairs, watching for people who had trouble breathing, those with heart trouble, with any kind of disability. When defects were found, large chalk marks, the equivalent of cattle brands, were written on clothing, a “C” for conjunctivitis, an “X” for suspected mental disease, and so on. A photo of men marked with a circled “X”, signifying deportable mental illnesses, is as unsettling a portrait of group despair as anyone wouldn’t want to see.

Some of the most interesting exhibits in Through America’s Gate involves ways devised to test the intelligence of illiterates. You can peer at a set of little blocks, each with a face with a slightly different expression, the task being to put people with similar expressions together.

Another test asked people to draw a diamond, something that, as examples show, proved especially difficult for peasants who had never held a pencil in their lives. Then there were the verbal tests. “How do you wash stairs, from the top or from the bottom?” an inspector asked. “I didn’t come to America,” came the snappy reply, “to wash stairs.”

It is difficult to pass through this exhibit without thinking how frightening this melange of incomprehensible tests, rigid rules and unbending doctors must have been to people like my parents, how it must have reminded them of everything authoritarian they fled the old country to escape.

Ellis Island must have been their first inkling that the New World, far from boasting streets paved with gold, would very much have its share of difficulties. And, more positively, it also must have given them the sense that if they could survive Ellis’ rigors, they could survive on the mainland as well.

On the opposite end of the second floor is another, equally compelling exhibit, Peak Immigration Years. With a wall of immigrant passports, as well as reproductions of steamship ads and such oddities as a poster warning young German girls not to be lured into prostitution, this section talks of why so many millions found the trip necessary and how wrenching an experience it turned out to be.

“Going to America was almost like going to the moon,” reads a quote from Golda Meir, the future prime minister of Israel. Another woman noted that when she left, her mother told her that seeing her at the railway station “was just like seeing me go into my casket.” Also worth more than a glance are a huge recruiting poster for California, describing the state as “the Cornucopia of the World . . . A Climate for Health and Wealth--Without Cyclones or Blizzards,” and a wall of immigrant-themed sheet music, everything from “I’m Going Back to the Land of Spaghetti” to “ ‘Yonkle the Cow-boy Jew’ . . . sung by that Yiddish hoofer, Glenn Burt.”

Though there are more exhibits on the building’s third floor--including Treasures from Home, a cross-section of the kinds of things immigrants brought with them, and an examination both of how the island looked during the years of its decline and how it came to be restored--the second floor had emotionally wrung me out. The only thing missing was a computer setup that would have enabled me to find out exactly when my parents arrived, something that National Parks Service officials say is only a few years, and not so few dollars, away.

I walked down the original Stairs of Separation, where immigrants were directed either off the island or to detention and possible deportation, past the newly painted Kissing Post, where anxious families often waited for new arrivals, and wandered across the baggage room to the inevitable souvenir shop and snack bar, with Ellis Island ashtrays and coffee mugs available in the former, Greek salads, Jewish rye and Norwegian fish sandwiches served in the latter.

Isn’t this always the way, I thought. Our institutions go from vitality to bureaucratization to decay, only to find an afterlife in restoration and kitsch souvenirs. But, finally, the triumph of the Ellis Island restoration is that it confronts you with the realization that what happened here was so real, so strong, it absolutely overwhelms the kitsch, overpowers the puny whiff of commercialization.

I walked outside to the patio and confronted one of the many brainchilds of Lee A. Iacocca, who, as chairman of the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, had masterminded the necessary restoration fund raising. Stretched out in front of me was the 200,000-strong American Immigrant Wall of Honor, the self-described “world’s longest wall of names,” where for $100 per you could have inscribed the names of members of your family who had immigrated to the United States, and who, no doubt, would be both shocked and pleased that their descendants could afford such largess.

When I’d first heard about the wall, I’d been less than enthusiastic about adding my mother’s and father’s names to the list. I considered it a rather dubious gimmick, not something I wanted to be associated with.

But now, after spending most of a day with the memories of my parents, feeling what they must have felt, I was no longer so cocky, so sure. Maybe I did want to be part of what was happening here, maybe I did want to commemorate their unsettling journey and be somehow connected with this small, nearly forgotten island that had meant so much to so many people not so very long ago.