The original building (along with immigration records dating back to the 1850s) burned in 1897 and was replaced in 1898 by a fireproof, Beaux-Arts complex of five buildings designed by Boring and Tilton. The Great Hall was a grand space that anticipated the soaring interior space of New York City's Grand Central Terminal, with which it had in common the use of Guastavino tile and the incorporation of the latest technology; it was one of the first major civic structures in New York to incorporate electrical systems in the building design. Through this station passed over seventy percent of the great migration to the United States from eastern and southern Europe. As photographs taken by Augustus Sherman and Lewis Hine reveal, some African and Caribbean natives, as well as a good number of northern Europeans, also entered the United States through Ellis Island.
Functioning as a bureaucratic station and transit point, Ellis Island was built from an ideological template. The Great Hall instructed those who passed through it about the efficiency of American culture. An outdoor exercise area displayed the grandeur of American life through a panorama featuring on one side the vigorously developing Manhattan skyline and on the other, the patriotic colossus erected just the decade before, the Statue of Liberty. From the start Ellis Island was a self-consciously Americanizing place that chose not to acknowledge the "birds of passage," as many as twenty percent of those processed who entered the United States to earn money and then return to their homelands.
On October 3, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson visited Liberty Island to sign an immigration bill into law that would direct the flow of immigration to the United States from Asia and the Caribbean. Focusing on the heritage of the United States as a nation of immigrants by standing at this emblematic spot, he caused attention to be turned to Ellis Island, the site of the earlier mass emigration from Europe. In 1967 Ellis Island was designated a national monument, administered, together with the Statue of Liberty, by the National Park Service. Plans for restoration began during the celebration of the 1986 centennial of the Statue of Liberty. Even during America's bicentennial year, visits to Ellis Island (limited to a May through October season) numbered only 45,138, while 1,473,311 people disembarked Circle Line ferries at Liberty Island.
Through private donations (including more than five hundred thousand contributions of one hundred dollars each to reserve spaces for family names on the "Wall of Honor" in the former exercise area), more than 150 million dollars was received for Ellis Island restoration. Since 1990 the island has welcomed more than two million visitors a year, more than twenty thousand on a typical weekend day during the summer. Both figures exceed the maximum number of immigrants processed by Ellis Island officials: a total of 1.28 million in 1907 and 11,747 on one April day during that year.
The Ellis Island Immigration Museum portrays all of the immigrant streams coming to the United States, concentrating on the unique Ellis Island experience. The museum's program consciously avoids the overtly celebratory air of the American Museum of Immigration (AMI), which opened in 1969 at the base of the Statue of Liberty. The Ellis Island Archives hold many of the AMI records, as well as records of discussions among museum professionals, National Park employees, and a consulting team of academics on how to portray the complexities of this lengthy mass migration to the United States through innovative displays and its introductory film, Island of Hope, Island of Tears. The domestic significance of the immigration station as the birthplace of the Public Health Service and the most important site of the Immigration and Naturalization Service receives little attention.
Since 1954 when it was declared surplus government property, Ellis Island has been a potential development site intimately connected to the economies of New York City and New Jersey. Early proposals would have razed the buildings and used the island as a platform for schemes as ominous as a nuclear power plant and as flamboyant as a Frank Lloyd Wright edifice. A proposed project submitted to the Park Service by the architecture firm of Johnson and Burgee would have kept the Great Hall but would have eliminated many of the other buildings (hospitals, isolation wards, psychiatric centers, and detention cells), which told a tale of disease and rejection.
Since the 1990 opening of the national park site, development attention has turned to the two-thirds of the island that remain derelict. Proposals for development range from an ambitious convention complex to a modest stabilization of ruins that would permit visitors access to these evocative structures. Since the early 1980s Ellis Island has been connected to Liberty State Park by a bridge for construction, emergency, and employee vehicles. In 1993 Congress authorized but did not fund a replacement bridge that would have allowed free pedestrian access to this site.
The symbolic and financial values of Ellis Island have brought to the surface the proprietary urges of the two states that now serve as embarkation points for visitors to the national monument. In 1993 New Jersey appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to resolve the boundary claims of New Jersey and New York. The Court appointed a Special Master to amass a historical and legal record of land use and ownership and then to recommend an action on the part of the Court. Ellis Island lies only one thousand feet (300 m) from the New Jersey shore, although legal documents required during the immigration station period, such as birth, marriage, and death certificates, were issued through New York. Following the 1837 agreement between the states regarding Ellis Island, significant expansions in 1899 and 1906 fashioned an island with two landing bays, one of which was transformed into a greensward in the 1920s. In 1997 the Supreme Court concurred with the Solomonic finding of its Special Master that only the four acres (1.6 ha) of the original island belonged to New York. The twenty-four acres (9.72 ha) of additional landfill, much of it coming from subway excavations in Manhattan, now lies within New Jersey's boundaries.
Immigration and Immigration Law
Chronicling America: Ellis Island (Library of Congress)
Un Povero Uomo: An Immigrant's Odyssey in America
Immigration to the United States: Ellis Island Immigration Station (N.Y. and N.J.)
Encyclopedia of American Studies, ed. Simon J. Bronner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), s.v. "Ellis Island" (by Eric J. Sandeen), http://eas-ref.press.jhu.edu/view?aid=191 (accessed August 23, 2018).
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