Ellis Island
Ellis Island is a small island beside the Statue of Liberty in Upper New York Bay. In the late 1900s America needed immigrants for its farms and production lines. Poverty and hunger in Italy and Ireland and the pogroms in Russia saw wave after wave of immigrants arrive in the 'promised land' through New York. With up to ten thousand new arrivals each day, ships were forced to queue for days in the bay. So Ellis Island was developed as a terminal for rich passengers and an immigration processing point and hospital for poor immigrants. It was extended from a scrap of rock to several acres by extensive land fill. The building programme was developed following laws paradoxically both brutal and benevolent. If you had 50 dollars or travelled in a cabin your immigration was processed on the boat and you went straight to the train. Everyone else was subjected to an interview and a medical. Names were often anglicised or changed altogether. Immigrants were processed by a doctor in 90 seconds, during which time 30 assessments were made - a white chalk mark meant a longer examination. Over 300 babies were born in the hospital, psychiatric patients were treated and autopsies carried out there led to scientific discoveries. The more ill you were the further down the long corridors of wards you were posted. Those with terminal or long term illnesses like TB were treated with a view of the Statue of Liberty. The staircase at the end of the processing section split three ways: the hospital, the dormitories, or the terminal building to New York.
The buildings fell into disuse, but were revived during the Second World War for use as a prisoner of war camp. At the end of the war a wing of these cells was locked off, and when I visited, it still was - few had been there since. On the walls and door frames 'Heil Hitler', 'Viva Mussolini', 'Palermo' have been scrawled on now flaking paint. As the hospital did for its terminal patients, the POW camp offered its prisoners a unique view of the southern tip of Manhattan, known as the 'billion dollar view'.Today the main hall is an immigration museum, a drop off point on the boat trip to the Statue of Liberty, and the stabilisation of the hospital wing is under way.