Despite falling into bed at the for-Izzy-outrageous hour of 11 p.m.,
we do have to get going the next morning because we have reservations on a
10:15 ferry to Ellis Island. Which takes
a really long time because they pack about ten thousand people onto these tubs,
so even though the distances between Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty and
Battery Park are not vast, you have to wait for practically the entire boat to
disembark at the Statue, then fill up again for the next leg. It takes like an hour to get to Ellis Island.
There are a lot of French tourists in New York this week, and about 12
million teenagers at Ellis Island. We
hear them all on the ferry and like us, they are yearning to be free of this
boat. Or maybe just their
chaperones. But it is a nice day, and
the views of the lower Manhattan skyline are spectacular, and we are on
vacation in the greatest-city-in-the-world so who cares?
I tried to generate some emotion by telling our offspring that this is
how their ancestors might have arrived, on a boat, right here, at this dock,
what do you think of that? Not much
apparently. But I think it is pretty
cool! The main buildings at Ellis Island
are these great Victorian beasts, all turrets and massive solid brickwork. You really do go in the door just as the
huddled masses might have done, and up the (rebuilt, it appears) staircase, where
the medical officers watched to see if you could handle the climb – were you
healthy enough to come to America? If
you couldn’t make it up the stairs, off to the medical exam and maybe back to
the old world with you.
We opt for the audio tour, which is great, guiding us through the
exhibit halls about immigration and arrival during the Island’s heyday, with
all kinds of good detail and oral history that we all like. It is possible that one or two of Bill’s
people came through here. The Island
operated as an immigration center from 1892 to the mid-1950s, and I think my
folk were all here before that, but he says maybe his mother’s grandfather? About 12 million people came through Ellis
Island, a number disturbingly reminiscent of the number of Africans forced onto
the Middle Passage. Those coming through
Ellis Island, for all their woes and fears, had – and one might argue still
have – it a lot better than the Africans.
But that lesson is for another time.
The place is of course completely fascinating. If you arrived first or second class, you
might have your immigration exam (health, papers) on board your vessel, likely
by customs officers who boarded at the Verrazano Narrows. Because, you know, if you were rich enough to
travel that way, you must be planning to be a contributing member of our
society, right? Health, schmealth, no
staircase for you! The teeming masses,
on the other hand, were ferried out to Ellis Island, to be examined physically,
mentally, and politically. If there were
questions, you stayed there until they were resolved – via a hearing if there
was a political situation, or medical exam, or quarantine. The most interesting looking places are the
long-shuttered dormitories and medical wards that line the other side of the
U-shaped island. Here is where you
stayed if you were waiting for relatives to confirm your existence, or if you
were sick, or if you were waiting for some kind of hearing. Some folks stayed weeks. Some, sadly, just until return passage could
be secured. One of the oral histories on
our recording is from an Italian-American woman whose grandmother was sent
back, all alone, because she had some health issue. The old woman on the audio cries like it was
yesterday, and it is quite heartbreaking.
Anyway, you can’t go in those buildings, although there are vague
plans to restore and open at least some of them. As for the main hall, it is late
Victorian-American institutional: all
frosted glass globe light fixtures and white subway tile. You can sit on some actual wooden benches
that the immigrants would have waited on.
The whole place wasn’t structurally damaged during Hurricane Sandy, but
the AC and electrical systems were destroyed, and they say that a number of
artifacts and exhibits suffered in the ensuing lack of climate control. Every once in a while you come upon an empty
display case or spot on the wall where a Sandy-artifact lived.
The heyday of Ellis Island coincided with the Progressive Era in the U.S.,
when people started to think about how to take care of the less-fortunate,
through social organization, service work, and eventually political reform. You can see all of that at play here. Manhattan do-gooders from every part of
society – religious, ethnic, and social groups – sent representatives to the
Island to help immigrants make their way in the new world. There were translators and medical doctors
and social workers all offering services to immigrants. Now, a big question in academic treatments of
this era is: what was the real purpose of all this good-deed-doing: to help or to sanitize? Give immigrants a hand up, or tamp down their
ethnic differences and make them (the Progressive’s version of) American? I’ll straddle the fence here and say a bit of
both. Certainly there was enormous
goodwill demonstrated toward newcomers – until they started to get organized
and unionize or vote for the wrong fella, that is.
Yet another story for another time.
Bill is particularly taken with the fact that Fiorello La Guardia,
future mayor of New York, worked as a translator at Ellis Island because he
spoke four languages in addition to English, including Croatian. We’re still trying to figure out where he
learned that.
In addition to the main exhibit, we visit something called Journeys or
somesuch that chronicles the coming of peoples to America prior to the 1890s,
as well as the movement of various groups around the country during the years
from First Contact up to the late 19th c. It is quite well done, incorporating white,
black, and Native American movements in equal measure, to and from and around
the US. But we are huddled with a lot of
masses here, and yearning to breathe free we escape outside to admire the view
of lower Manhattan and the budding trees around the Wall of Honor. This is an impressive list of thousands and
thousands of names, and you might think, how amazing, they have a monument to
all the people who came through here.
But you would be wrong, because anyone can get their name on the Wall of
Honor, you just have to pay for it.
Still, it is said that over 100 million Americans today can trace their
ancestry to someone who came through Ellis Island, so that’s not chicken feed.
Once you got through immigration, you might head to the Lower East
Side, as did Bill’s great-grandfather on his mum’s side. And as do we, but I’m pretty sure that the
immigrants did not get to stop for a ride on the Sea Glass Carousel in Battery
Park to take their minds off of their troubles.
If they had, how happy they would be, as were Izzy and I, to drift
around inside giant pastel fiberglass fish, which kind of glowed on and off,
all to a soundtrack of something that sounded like what Prokofiev’s Romeo and
Juliet might sound like if played underwater by a bombastic piscine
orchestra. It was pretty fabulous, and
if you want to see it, check out my Facebook page, where there is a video of
our experience.
After a trek over to the 9/11 Memorial and a frustrated attempt to get
inside the Santiago Calatrava boondoggle-I-mean-PATH-station, we cab it
(finally) to the LES for lunch at Russ and Daughters Café. So happy are we to be there that we take
goofy pictures and order the trifecta of egg creams: chocolate, malt, and something called Buxar
that tasted a bit like molasses. Peter
liked it at first but then wished he’d just had chocolate. I had a cucumber soda that I would very much
like to make at home.
It is pretty late in the day and we are pretty exhausted so we trek
back to the hotel and collapse in a heap until dinner.
According to an article in today’s New York Times that I haven’t read,
the subways of the Northeastern cities are in terrible shape, and basically a
disaster waiting to happen. But I think
those in New York City are pretty great.
I’m sure that if I had to ride them daily I would not think so, but I’m
mad for the mosaics that decorate some of the stations, particularly the giant
fish (herring no doubt) that adorn the walls at Delancey Street.
We are delighted to connect with the New Jersey Lauterbachs for
dinner, who lead us to Le Relais de Venise for steak frites. Ironically, it is a branch of a restaurant
that I wanted to go to in Paris last summer, and here we are in New York. But it is great, and a perfect place for
Peter because they bring you seconds of steak frites mit secret sauce, which
makes him very happy.[1] And they have gorgeously classic desserts
like profiteroles. My brother says that
they fly the sauce in from Paris.
Oo-la-la.
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