A CONSULTANT group hired by the National Park Service has just recommended a “new” plan on what to do with the southern half of Ellis Island, which served as America’s portal during the great wave of turn-of-the-century immigration.
The proposal: Turn the 29 long-abandoned buildings across from the Great Hall – including former hospital and dormitory units – into the Ellis Island Institute, an international conference center focusing on immigration and ethnic studies.
If that suggestion sounds familiar, it should. It was first proposed in 1949 and has been reintroduced in slightly different forms every decade since; I first wrote about it in a series of articles in 1985. Since then, however, the National Park Service has failed to move on this or any other proposal for Ellis Island.
Indeed, only now is the Park Service proceeding with a $6.6-million program to stabilize the buildings on Ellis Island’s south side after nearly a half-century of total neglect. I toured those buildings 14 years ago with John Belle, whose firm was restoring the fabled Great Hall. To see those buildings even then in a state of advanced decay was disheartening; yet no action was taken to preserve the buildings for future use until last week.
Unlike the Statue of Liberty, its neighbor in New York Harbor, Ellis Island has had a troubled and complicated history. From 1892 to 1924, it was the great entry point for immigrants – but only those who’d traveled steerage. First- and second-class passengers were allowed to bypass Ellis Island and its rigorous health-inspection regimen. For the last half of its active life, it was little more than a detention center for those facing deportation.
For the immigrants themselves, Ellis Island was not a place of wistful memories. As a piece of graffiti in one abandoned building put it: “Why should I fear the fires of hell – I’ve been through Ellis Island.” Fannie Kligerman, who came to Ellis Island in 1905 as a youngster with her family after fleeing European pograms, remembered it in an oral history as “just like a prison.”
When her little brother developed a sty in his eye, she recalled, “they put him aside. And they told us that if there was anything wrong with him, he’d have to go back to Europe.” For all the joy of having made it to America, she said, “there was not a smile on anybody’s face. … Such a sad place. There were more tears in Ellis Island to 10 people than, say, to a hundred people elsewhere.”
Since it was shut in 1954, there has mostly been general agreement that the island would make a perfect academic/conference center. But no one has been able to agree on the specific content or on a funding formula. Even the latest Park Service plan calls for a vague combination of public subsidies, private donations and revenue-generating activities.
Bill Hubbard has spent 15 years and $2 million trying to revive the island’s forgotten half. Back in the ’80s, his non-profit group, now known as the Center Development Corp., submitted various proposals to develop academic conference centers on Ellis Island.
One plan was for a joint program with Rutgers and SUNY and would have housed an archives and training center for the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The Park Service accepted the idea, but Hubbard brooked the ire of Lee Iacocca, whose private Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation had taken on fund-raising responsibilities for the two restoration projects and marketed them to companies as “a monumental profit opportunity.”
Iacocca blocked Hubbard’s plan and demanded approval of his own idea – tearing down all the historic buildings and replacing them with a garish, Disney World-like “ethnic Williamsburg.”
Luckily, the Park Service said no and Iacocca was removed from the commission planning the island’s future. By then, however, the recession had kicked in and corporate interest in funding the center, once deemed “a cinch” by Goldman Sachs, had evaporated. A later Hubbard plan died when the battle erupted over ownership of the south half – which the Supreme Court ultimately decided in New Jersey’s favor.
So now we’re back to another conference-center plan for this historic island. Those who eagerly tour the beautifully restored Great Hall doubtless have little idea of the interminable delay and dithering that has allowed those important historical sites across the dock to decay almost into oblivion.
If you’re interested in seeing the forgotten half of Ellis Island, which has long been off-limits to the public, check out a new exhibit on display through next February at the Museum of the City of New York. “Forgotten Gateway: The Abandoned Buildings of Ellis Island” features 45 photographs of the buildings taken by Larry Racioppo.
Hopefully, the neglect and disrepair recorded in Racioppo’s photos will eventually be a distant memory and the south side of Ellis Island will be restored to vibrant and productive uses. But don’t bet on that happening any time soon.