Reopening The Gate of America

By Richard Lacayo

In 1906 H.G. Wells visited the great immigration center at Ellis Island, about a mile off the lower tip of Manhattan. The distinguished British writer and advance man for the future wanted to see for himself how arrivals from the Old World were ushered into the new one. He found the process strangely unceremonious. "On they go, from this pen to that," he wrote, "pen by pen, towards a desk at a little metal wicket -- the gate of America."

If Ellis Island was a paradox, a place where dreams bumped up against bureaucracy, it was no less a place where one of the most powerful currents of American life flowed by. Between 1892 and 1924, 12 million immigrants first touched U.S. soil there. Forty percent of all Americans can look back to an ancestor who passed through its doors. Abandoned more than three decades ago, Ellis Island reopens its doors this week as pure, potent symbol. After a ; seven-year, $156 million restoration, the most expensive single refurbishment in the nation's history, the main building has been transformed into a monument to the majesty and pain of the immigrant experience.

While many of the rooms have been restored as the bare examination chambers they once were, about half the sizable structure has been converted into the Ellis Island Museum of Immigration. There films, artifacts, oral histories and 1,500 photographs will attempt to tell the story of not only the mostly European arrivals who passed through Ellis Island but also the millions who came during other eras, from other places and through other points of entry: Africans hauled by force to Southern slave markets, Latin Americans who trekked northward, Asians who flew into San Francisco.

"So often when America builds a monument, it's to one great individual, " says American University history professor Alan Kraut, who was an adviser on the project. "What is so special about Ellis Island is it really is a monument to the masses." The chief monument is the main building itself, a beaux arts structure with French Renaissance trappings that was erected in 1900 after fire destroyed an earlier terminal. Immigration dropped off sharply after Congress imposed restrictive quotas in the 1920s, and by 1954 Ellis Island was abandoned to the pigeons and vandals. Its revival was supervised by the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island restoration project, which raised money from private and corporate contributions, and by the National Park Service, which owns the 27.5-acre island.

The average time that immigrants spent in the main building was short (three to five hours) but fateful. After depositing their baggage, they headed for the immense, vaulted Registry Room on the second floor. The stairway climb was called the "60-second physical" because nurses and doctors were perched at the top to weed out anyone who looked short of breath -- a possible sign of tuberculosis and heart disease. Then came more formal medical examinations and questions about the newcomers' politics. Anarchists and Bolsheviks were sent home. Others were singled out for further medical testing and possible expulsion.

Eventually the would-be Americans found themselves at the other end of the hall, facing what came to be called the "staircase of separation." There they divided, some bound for New York City, some for cities elsewhere and a hapless third group diverted to detention rooms on the island. Only about 2% of arrivals were denied entry, mostly for reasons of health or politics, but during peak years it could be as many as 1,000 a month.

In its busiest year, 1907, more than 1.2 million people filed through that chamber. Now the place will be filled again: perhaps 1.5 million visitors are expected this year. "The idea is to let them muse on what the space was like," says architect John Belle, whose firm was one of two that shared the restoration work, "filled with a Babel of voices, with the people inching their way to the end." Once again, Ellis Island is to be the gate of America. This time, it opens onto the past.

With reporting by Daniel S. Levy/New York