Rangers-Devils: It’s More Than a Game

The puck is dropped here. Here is the Meadowlands Arena where a third major confrontation between representatives of New York and New Jersey continued with Game 3 of the NHL’s Eastern Conference finals Thursday night. It also was the sight of a recent showdown in the NBA playoffs in which, 13 nights earlier, the Knickerbockers eliminated the Nets.

That victory provided New York with a 1-0 advantage over New Jersey in the May sweeps competition between the states. The Stanley Cup series also tilted to the east after the Rangers skated to a 3-2 double-overtime triumph over the Devils, forging a 2-1 lead in the best-of-seven event. It may be some time before we learn the outcome of the other territorial fracas, one that also involves bragging rights.

On Monday, only 12 hours after the Devils had stunned the Rangers, 4-3, in double overtime of the series opener at Madison Square Garden, the Supreme Court issued an order permitting New Jersey to proceed with a lawsuit challenging New York’s jurisdiction over Ellis Island. In effect, the justices agreed to resolve a long-running dispute over the 27.5-acre spit of land in New York Harbor that, along with neighboring Liberty Island, stands as a vibrant symbol of America’s immigrant heritage. Freed from the tight schedule governing the hockey and basketball leagues, they may get around to debating the issue by the end of the year.

Although the island clearly belongs to the federal government and was placed under the care of the National Park Service by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, both pride and prosperity have goaded the Garden State into legal action. Geographically, both the Great Hall that served as the gateway to the New World for generations of immigrants and the nearby Statue of Liberty are closer to the New Jersey shoreline, yet always have been associated with New York. The area code on island telephones is 212, not 201.

It is estimated that more than 80 percent of the 1.5 million annual visitors arrive on ferries from lower Manhattan as opposed to those running from Liberty State Park, near Jersey City. New Jersey would like a larger share of the tourist industry and is planning to build a footbridge to Ellis Island, a project authorized by Congress in 1992 but not scheduled for construction until 1997. It would like to be permanently identified with the site of the national monument and museum that was opened in 1990.

New Jersey is basing its claim on a 160-year-old interstate compact which placed the boundary between the states in the middle of the Hudson River but made the island, as it then existed, an extension of New York State. All that existed at the time, however, was three acres which one-time owner Samuel Ellis identified as “that pleasant situated island

According to New Jersey’s suit, the additional 24.5 acres are within its jurisdiction under a clause of the compact, approved by Congress, that deeded it the land then underwater as well as various wharves and piers on the shoreline. It is asking the Court to declare New York’s jurisdiction be limited to “the former mean high water line of the original natural island.”

Standing at the information desk in the first-floor Baggage Room Thursday, Park Ranger Eugene Kuziw tried to place the dispute in layman’s terms. “Anything above the water line is New York, anything below is New Jersey,” he said wryly. “There was a ferry in the slip when the island was deserted in 1954. It was sitting in New York but then it sank into New Jersey.”

Mind you, the man wasn’t taking sides. Ellis Island belongs to all Americans, as the cross-section of yesterday’s visitors demonstrated. People of all ages, from small groups of senior citizens to large clumps of schoolchildren, roamed through the three-story restored building and braved the rain outside to check for family names on the curving American Immigrant Wall of Honor.

A person fixated on the current hockey series noted the names included a Michael Francis Keenan, a Robert and Elizabeth Leetch, several immigrants named Lemieux and many Richters. Although it has been a long time since America was known as “the melting pot,” both the Rangers and the Devils could qualify as exercises in cultural bonding. The home team dressed two Russians, a Czech and a Swede as well as the usual assortment of Canadians and Americans. Four Russians and a Finn spiced the roster of the Rangers.