Plans are afoot to build exhibitions on the dilapidated south side of Ellis Island - but not everyone is in agreement, writes Belinda McKeon
'Old Ellis Island was swarming, like a scene from a costume ball" - it's a rose-tinted vision, that opening line from the popular ballad Emigrant Eyes, but a striking one nonetheless; immigrants in their thousands, emerging pale and blinking from the steerage holds in which they had spent long months, onto the patch of land where they would win or lose their chance of a new start in the US. It sticks in the mind, and on a warm autumn afternoon more than a century on from the time of that song's setting, it surfaces.
For the Ellis Island that swarms with people today is the island of the tourist trail, of the video exhibit, of the endless queues for ferry rides on the circle line, of the camcorder and the Lonely Planet guide. The building that was once the island's massive reception centre, its towers of red brick and limestone climbing high at the harbour mouth, was transformed into a three-storey museum to mark its centenary in 1992, and its high hall, where immigrant legal and medical inspections took place between 1892 and 1954, has been restored to its original splendour.
It's an impressive sight, and so too are the traces of the 12 million people who passed through there in the six decades of the building's operation as a federal bureau for the processing of newcomers - their steamer trunks, their tattered clothes, their yellowed passports and tickets. These people were the poorer passengers, their lower social class marked out by their obligation to undergo the ordeal of questioning, examination and possible detainment on the island; first- and second-class passengers underwent a decidedly less taxing experience of processing on board their ships. However, they were the minority. Some 40 per cent of all Americans can trace their ancestry to this spot, and every day the cubicles of a dedicated history centre within the museum are busy with their efforts to do so.
But it's a door to the rear of those cubicles that leads to the old Ellis Island in the truest sense - not swarming, but shabby, and sprawling, and desperately sad. Past this door are the dust-filled halls and corridors of the buildings that held, for days or for years, those immigrants who were denied entry to the US on grounds of illness, insanity or infirmity: the hospital, the asylum, the residences for doctors and officials, the dormitories for those awaiting the release of family members - and the morgue.
This is the hidden Ellis Island, the faded acreage left behind when, in the 1980s, private donations funded the restoration of the three buildings that stand gleaming today. So vast are those spaces, so arresting their position at the water's edge, that it is difficult to believe they comprise so little of the island's footprint - just one-11th of its structures. Beyond those three buildings, across the ferry slip from the Great Hall and the museum, lie the 30 additional buildings that form the area known simply as the island's "south side" - the buildings left to rot and rust and slowly wither away.
But age will no longer wither them. At least not if the fundraisers and planners behind the non-profit organisation established to preserve these buildings can help it. Save Ellis Island was established after the Supreme Court decision in 1998 to grant the island's south side and its buildings to the state of New Jersey rather than to New York, following a bitter legal battle over the territory waged between the two neighbouring states. New York owns the section of the island that has already been restored, New Jersey the dilapidated remainder.
To those New Jersey officials and conservationists who fought for it, the island's south side seemed a poisoned chalice once finally secured. A plan for its restoration and reuse took some years to emerge - it was finally released in 2003 - and bore a price-tag of more than $300 million (€250 million) from the beginning. The buildings seemed already lost, crumbling and overgrown, ravaged by a combination of neglect, salt air and the vandalism of those who broke into the island during the decades following its official closure. Dark and dangerous to enter - apart from the rusting metal and corroding stone, there was the matter of asbestos-lined walls to contend with - the hospital wards, kitchens and laundry houses seemed fit only for the owls and sea birds that had taken them over, the once-landscaped grounds best left to the Canadian geese, which grew so comfortable on the island they ceased their seasonal migration.
AS THE PRESERVATION group, in partnership with the National Park Service, began to assess the arduous task ahead of it, an unnerving feature of the island seemed to serve as an ill omen: one of the original immigrant ferries, slumped sideways in a rotting wooden slip, the tip of its rusted gunwale surfacing at low tide. On the closure of the island, the ferry, with all of its potent symbolism, had simply been allowed to sink and fall away.
Today, as Lauren Lee, one of the people behind Save Ellis Island, leads me through the huge, silent spaces of these long-forgotten buildings, the sight of the sunken ferry comes to her as a surprise. So low is the tide that more of its hulking form is on display than she has ever seen before; it lies there, just outside the doors of the ferry building, like an animal, grown more trusting, that has suddenly moved closer to shore. The building from which we view it is one of the two sites Save Ellis Island has so far managed to partly restore; huge clear panes of glass and smooth, Amish-built door frames face calmly out onto the ocean.
Like the ferry building, the laundry and hospital outbuilding - the exterior of which has also been restored - is relatively small; when the organisation received its first injection of private-public funding, these buildings were the obvious places to begin work. Once their interiors have also been restored, they will house the first of the developments that the organisation has planned for the south side: an exhibit dedicated to immigration and public health in the context of the island's hospitals, possibly examining the US government's early response to contagious diseases such as measles and TB against modern responses to the Aids, Sars and perhaps now even the avian flu viruses.
Such a plan signals, for some, the sting in the tail of the Save Ellis Island endeavour. The organisation's plans for the buildings of the south side include museum exhibits, an institute of learning focusing on ethnic diversity and the global phenomenon of immigration - as well as some sort of conference centre appealing to the corporate market, with existing halls, wards and bedrooms converted into meeting rooms, auditoriums and extensive catered accommodation.
CRITICS, WHO HAVE aired their views both in the public comment process facilitated by the organisation and in the media, say that such a centre will only serve to extend the commercialism of the existing museum to the rest of the island. Others fear that the plans will damage the quiet beauty of the south side, or even the spirits of whose who have passed through - and of the 3,500 immigrants (including 1,400 children) who met their deaths while waiting here.
"It's the only peaceful spot left in the vicinity of Manhattan," says Alex Wegner, a local writer. "It would be ridiculous to turn it into some kind of corporate mini-mall."
It's a catch-22 situation; as they stand, the spaces and rooms of the south side are hauntingly beautiful, evoking through their very decrepitude the immense poignancy of the place and its history. A single white chair remains stood before a window in the doctor's quarters, looking out to sea. White walls are stripped back to reveal huge knuckles of careful stonework beneath, testimony to the toil that built this place; wooden floorboards seem skinned away, so thin and delicate are their countless splinters; huge iron window panes dangle, broken, in the salt air; the massive shapes of old elevator shafts, washing machines and mangler stand black with rust.
Every corner, every light-flooded corridor, leads to a new wonder: a doorway right onto the water, as if in Venice; the elegant curve of a garden space or a skylight; the neat white tiles and parquet floors of the operating rooms; the startling view of Liberty Island from the measles ward. Babies were born here, more than 350 of them, under these corroding surgery lamps; psychiatric patients were held here, their movements curtailed by a cage of white iron clamped, to this day, over the facade of the psychopathic ward; mothers, fathers, daughters and sons waited here, in the dormitory building, with its ornate iron staircases. And bodies were stored here, in the old-fashioned freezers of the island morgue.
Apart from the fact that most of the furniture has been moved, hardly anything seems different. Wouldn't the place be a wonderful museum just as it is, in all its abandoned, unnerving, glory? A sort of ghost town paying homage to all of those ghosts? In an ideal world, yes. But, as Lee explains, the extensive work of stabilisation that the organisation has already carried out - the less glamorous sister to restoration, involving the duller tasks of securing roof structures, venting door and window frames, and removing hazardous materials - is the only reason that the buildings can even be viewed. And their current state of genteel dilapidation, however moving, can only be temporary if the buildings are to survive in the long term; the choice between restoration and ruin is a stark one.
As for the idea of restoring the 22.5 acre site to look exactly as it did in the early 20th century, the organisation insists that some balance between rehabilitation and reclamation must be struck if the funds necessary to preserve the south side are to be raised.