Immigration Hospital

Started: 2024-11-17 14:50:18

Submitted: 2024-11-17 19:38:09

Visibility: World-readable

A hard-hat tour of the immigration hospitals on Ellis Island; a glimpse into our immigration history; and the challenges of historical preservation and restoration

On Saturday, the 19th of October, my sister Bethany and I went to see the Ellis Island hard-hat tour of the unrestored hospital wing of the island opposite the restored immigration station. I learned about the tour when we visited Ellis Island in 2022 and resolved to come back and see it.

We caught a 6 train south from Midtown, and saw someone who looked like they were dressed as Link on our train. They got off at Grand Central, which I understand is the transfer point between Hyrule and the Javits Center, where NYC Comic Con was being held. (At Grand Central we transferred to an express 4 train to Bowling Green.)

At the southern tip of Manhattan we walked across Battery Park to find the shorter express line for special tickets, which included the Statue of Liberty pedestal and crown tickets, as well as our Ellis Island hard-hat tour. After a security check we joined the crowd waiting for the next ferry, then shuffled onto the ferry's lower deck via the narrow boarding door.

We climbed up to the top deck of the ferry where we had a view of the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan, including the new One World Trade Center, above the trees of Battery Park. It was a bright clear fall day; and Bethany said that old-time New Yorkers get anxious on clear blue fall days like this because that's what the weather was like on September 11, 2001.

The ferry departed from Battery Park and cruised across New York Harbor towards Liberty Island. We crossed in front of the Statue of Liberty then looped around to the dock on the far side of the island, lining up a perfect of shot the statue with the New York skyline in the distance. It seemed like everyone on the boat had their phones or cameras up to capture the shot.

The hard-hat tours started on Liberty Island at specific times, and there was some relationship between the time shown on our ticket (indicating our arrival time at the security line in Battery Park) and the alleged start of our tour that suggested that we should target the tour starting at 12:00. This gave us enough time to disembark the ferry on Liberty Island and make a quick walk around the sea wall, taking in the view of Manhattan and the various angles of the statue itself, through the crowds of people on the walkway.

The last time I visited Liberty Island, two years ago, we took more time listen to the audio tour and read the interpretive signs to understand and appreciate the statue and its history. This time I watched the statue and the people, and thought about the symbolism of the Statue of Liberty and American immigration, in the face of the then-upcoming presidential election and the naked racism and xenophobia expressed by one of the candidates.

We returned to the ferry dock and caught the next ferry to Ellis Island. The ferry looped back around in front of the Statue of Liberty. I stayed on the lower deck and got a snack at the snack bar, since we were targeting the 12:00 tour at what would have nominally been lunch time. We stepped off the ferry on Ellis Island and found the tour desk in time to join the next tour.

To kick off the tour our guide asked everyone to introduce themselves with their immigration story as their connection to Ellis Island, while we were standing on the lawn in front of the main immigration building. (Our guide, and the whole tour group, presented as white Americans.) One woman said her husband came from Italy, "but he came in to JFK", because that's where immigrants land today. The last time I visited Ellis island I found up my Weng great-grandparents in the immigration records, so we mentioned that. It was a quick reminder that every white American's ancestors immigrated from Europe, likely in the heyday of American immigration at the beginning of the twentieth century, at a time when the "right way" to immigrate was to buy a ticket on a ship and show up in New York with the right color of skin. The American immigration system is a trash fire of racism (and it always has been) and it's disgusting to see it leveraged for political gains.

The second thing our guide asked us was what state we were standing in. No one knew the right answer, which was that the original footprint of the natural island (roughly underneath the main immigration building itself) is New York, and the rest of the island, built as fill from dirt excavated from subway construction, is New Jersey. Apparently New Jersey insisted on claiming as much of Ellis Island as it could, when the buildings on the immigration station were restored and reopened as a tourist site after decades of abandonment.

We stepped through a gate dividing the smaller publically-accessible part of the island from the rest of the island. A long brick-walled corridor ran along the spine of the island, connecting all of the buildings under a covered roof. We followed the corridor into the art deco Ferry Building, which had been restored inside, but looked a little sterile so I couldn't find a good angle to get a reasonable picture of the room. The ferry building was the last stop on the island of the immigrants who passed through the island; from here they boarded ferries to Manhattan to enter the United States as permanent residents.

We picked up hard hats in the corridor, then walked past the Ferry Building towards the hospital wing of the island. The island is roughly shaped like a large square letter "C", with the main immigration building on the upper (northern) part of the "C", the Ferry Building at the left, and two hospital complexes on the southern part of the island, separated by a large lawn. The modern tourist ferries dock in the harbor right in front of the immigration building. We walked down the corridor to a broad curved "Y", where the corridor split.

We took the left branch to the acute-care hospital, which served immigrant arrivals who required medical attention but were not infectious. The nonprofit Save Ellis Island had been working to restore the hospital in 2012 when Hurricane Sandy hit the island, flooding everything and destroying their work in progress. (In the corridors, visible in my pictures, there's a bathtub ring about three feet high on the wall where the flood water leeched the lime out of the mortar in the brick walls.) The main hospital's basement was completely flooded, and it wasn't totally safe to enter most of it, so we only briefly visited the main hospital before spending the majority of our time at the infectious diseases hospital.

The only room we visited in the main hospital was the old laundry room. This room was kept in a state of arrested decay, with a faint glossy topcoat painted on the walls to keep the lead paint in place and protect the walls from moisture. Save Ellis Island doesn't have the hundreds of millions of dollars they would need to fully restore the hospital, so instead they've attempted to preserve the current state of the buildings to prevent further damage. The very idea of restoration presents questions about how they choose which era to present and how to balance the original appearance with the original building techniques with the materials still present.

The old institutional-scale laundry equipment was left in place, slowly rusting away for decades after the entire island had been abandoned.

We stepped out of the laundry room into the sunny lawn between the two hospitals. We walked along the main hospital and looked at the various buildings from the outside, then headed across the lawn to the infectious diseases hospital.

Most of the windows were covered with sheets of OSB intended to protect what remained of the existing windows, and protect the interior of the building from the outside weather. The boards had small holes cut out of them to let in some light, which gave the impression of a small window in a door, as if someone could open the second-floor window and step outside of the building into open space.

The infectious diseases hospital, on the south end of the island, was in somewhat better shape than the main hospital; though that doesn't mean it was in particularly good shape. It connected to the main corridor running along the spine of the island, and reached out on a right angle with its own enclosed corridor connecting buildings on both sides. Most of the buildings were wards dedicated to specific diseases; some were administrative or other buildings.

Our guide led us down a side corridor, past an open window with a view outside to the next ward. Here it looked like they were trying to collect and catalog bricks from the site and use them to rebuild parts of the buildings. All of the corridors and wards were unlabeled; any identifying marks had long since decayed (or been removed by people seeking trophies from the buildings in the decades in which they had been abandoned).

At the end of a dead-end corridor our guide took us to the morgue, which was set up with refrigerated storage for bodies, and a theater where autopsies were performed in front of an audience of doctors.

We began our walk down the long hospital corridor, stopping in most of the wards and other buildings on either side of the corridor. Unlike most hospitals I've been in, this one seems to have been built and never remodeled or expanded; so it seemed rather less confusing to navigate. Everything was on one side or the other of the main hallway, though the wards did mostly look alike and they were built in two stories, with men and women hospitalized on different floors.

We stepped into one of the infectious disease wards on the ground floor. The large empty room was once lined with beds filled with patients. Each ward was dedicated to a specific disease, to reduce the chances that patients would infect each other with diseases they didn't already have. All of the wards were designed to have their windows open to ventilate air outside, and heat the rooms via radiators to maintain room temperature.

When the hospital was built they knew about germ theory but hadn't worked out all of the details yet. They thought that germs could hide in sharp corners, so they built all of the interior corners with curves. This turned out not to be true, but it is true that it's easier to clean concave curves than sharp corners, so it worked out.

Throughout our tour of the hospitals we saw multiple pieces of an art installation that took original black-and-white pictures from Ellis Island and printed them at large scale (often approaching life-size for the people in the photos) and posted them in places where the pictures had been taken. We saw immigrants working in the laundry room, and hospitalized immigrants on the patios getting fresh air. The art installation had been in place for more than a decade, and it was beginning to decay, representing the overall decay of the buildings on Ellis Island.

One work where the decay was especially evident was in the hospital kitchen. On the tile above where the stove used to sit along one long wall, in the place of the large steel hood that had been moved across the room, there was a picture of the ferry that carried people from the island to Manhattan. The tile had been water-damaged since the art was placed, and it was peeling off the plaster wall, taking the art with it.

There were multiple wards along the corridor, most of which looked alike. The one exception was the tuberculosis ward, which placed patients in their own rooms with two sinks: one for washing, and a separate sink for coughing, which had its own drainage system so the infectious mucous would be incinerated before anyone could touch it. In one room there was a mirror on the wall that reflected a view of the Statue of Liberty. Our guide pointed it out and lined us up so we could each get a view of this symbol from the room where a person would have waited, not quite yet able to enjoy its promise.

As we worked our way down the corridor I kept looking back to see where we'd come from. Originally the windows would have been clear letting natural light stream into the corridor, but now they were all protected against further decay, with only a tiny fraction of the light coming through.

Towards the end of the hospital we visited an operating room, at the end of a curved corridor. In the window was another piece of the art installation, and here too it was decaying with the broken window it was mounted on.

The operating room was large and sparse. It was hard to tell how it would have been used without the equipment and people that would have worked here.

The hospital bathrooms were all built with marble partitions and fancy fixtures, as an explicit bit of propaganda so that patients staying in the hospital would write to people they knew and tell them that even the bathrooms were fancy so this must be a rich country.

The last room we saw, at the end of the long corridor of hospital rooms (and, metaphorically, at the end of the road for the patients who stayed there) was the hospice room. It had been outfitted better than the wards, with a wood floor, but the wooden floor had decayed worse than the tile on the floor of the wards. Its large windows looked out on the Statue of Liberty, symbolizing the new country that these patients wouldn't get to experience for themselves.

And then, an hour-and-a-half after starting our tour, we stepped out of the infectious diseases hospital and into the bright mid-day sun, right across the water from the Manhattan skyline.

This was my chance to get a selfie wearing the tour's hard hat on Ellis Island in front of the skyline.

Our tour guide took us back along the outside of the main hospital and into the main corridor leading along the island. We gave up our hard hats and walked back to the main part of the island where we could once again roam unaccompanied through the main immigration building. Visiting the hundred-year-old hospitals on the island was an amazing glimpse into a time when the United States was welcoming of (some) immigrants, as well as a new perspective on the challenges of historical preservation of important historical sites.

I took a bunch of pictures on and around Ellis Island, more than I could fit above. They're all at Photos on 2024-10-19.