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Annie Moore’s entry to New York was swifter than mine. In December,cheap retro jordans, it took me two hours and 15 minutes to get from the plane to the front of the immigration queue at JFK and out on to the street. A hundred and twenty-five years ago this Sunday,http://www.siemprelucenacf.es/index.php/component/user/?option=com_content&view=article&id=115cheapjordanshoesfreeshipping.com/bolg, on January 1 1892, Annie got through Ellis Island, in New York Harbour, in less than half an hour.


She was aged between 13 and 17 (accounts vary). I had flown in a 747 from London in just over eight hours; she had been squashed with her two younger brothers into the steerage compartment of the SS Nevada, which had chugged from Queenstown (now Cobh),cheap air jordans, in Co Cork, for 11 days.









The main immigration building is a grand French Renaissance-style edifice in red brick and limestone

Credit: Alamy







At Ellis Island, as the first person to enter the hulking new immigration station – the first in the country to be federally run – she became something of a VIP. At a lectern-like desk an official checked her name, age, last place of residence and intended destination: a house a few blocks from the waterfront in Manhattan, where her parents and two older siblings had been living for four years. She was welcomed with a short speech and presented with gold and silver coins. Then off she went with her brothers to join the rest of the family.


Over the next 62 years, more than 12?million immigrants, many fleeing poverty or persecution, famine or war, would follow in Annie’s footsteps to begin new lives in America. Their stories, their trials and triumphs, are told in the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration, which drew more than four million visitors last year . It’s a place where the immigrant experience is celebrated (nearly 40 per cent of Americans have an ancestor who arrived there) but where America’s periodic anxieties over immigration – witness Donald Trump’s promise to wall off Mexicans – are also acknowledged.


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One exhibit on latter-day arrivals has two videos juxtaposed. In one, a Peruvian student who arrived at 13 without papers comes close to tears disclosing that she can’t apply for college because she isn’t an American citizen. In the next, a lawyer whose parents immigrated legally from Ecuador says that America has a generous immigration policy and can’t take “illegals”: “This is a matter of the rule of law. Citizenship is a privilege; it’s not an entitlement, and it’s not a right.”


The main building on Ellis Island is a grand French Renaissance-style edifice in red brick and limestone, a replacement for the original that burnt down in 1897. It’s impressive to the 21st-century tourist, but it must have been intimidating to early immigrants. Sam Webb, a long-serving National Park ranger (“I’m somewhere between 60 and death”), walked me through it.











A memorial statue of Annie Moore, who got through Ellis Island, in New York Harbour, in less than half an hour

Credit: Getty







We began at the ground-floor staircase on the right of the entrance, a modern replacement for an original used by millions. “All they have to do is get up this flight of stairs and down the flight at the back,” Sam said. “It will be the longest walk they will take.”


As they climbed – some having refused to set down cases that held all their worldly goods – they were given “a six-second physical” by medical inspectors on the lookout for the sick, the mentally deficient, the senile and the heavily pregnant. At the top, they might find themselves chalked with a code: “Sc” if suspected of having favus, a fungal disease that attacks the scalp, or “Ct” for Chlamydia trachomatis, the infection that causes the contagious eye disease trachoma.


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New arrivals joined one of a series of queues. One by one they were called forward by clerks whose job was to cross-examine them, check that their answers matched details on the ship’s manifest and ensure that they weren’t undesirables or “likely to become a public charge”. They were then sent towards a divided flight of stairs – the “Stairs of Separation”. The right-hand side led to the railroad ticket office, the left-hand side to the New York ferry, the central stairs to detention rooms.


“It wasn’t until you got through the doors at the bottom that you had any inkling you were going out,” Sam said. Friends and relatives, already settled in America, would be waiting there. “?'Is that Uncle Harry? Is that Aunt Mary?’ When you saw those familiar faces, it dawned on you that you’d made it. That’s where your new life in America officially began.”









The immigration hall in 1912

Credit: Getty







For some – two per cent of arrivals were refused entry – that fresh start never happened. For others, it was delayed. The detained could wait weeks or months before their case was settled. The sick and the pregnant were sent to a hospital on the south side of the island. One immigrant in 10 received treatment at what may have been in its day the most modern hospital in the country.


Working with the National Park Service, Save Ellis Island has partially restored several hospital buildings, and since October 2014 has been offering tours. Walls are holed, timbers peeling and pitted, floors bumpy; ceilings have mini stalactites where 50 years’ worth of rain has leached out the lime. Wards, examination rooms, nurses’ stations and corridors are quiet, empty – and yet at the same time peopled.


Here and there, the French street artist JR has pasted life-size black-and-white archive photographs of immigrants and hospital staff. You glimpse these ghosts apparently ascending a staircase as you pass by an entrance; peering through a window as if pleading to be allowed in. In a surgical theatre, a doctor stands on one side of a door frame while on the other the masked heads of his colleagues, engaged in an operation, float above broken white tiles.





Bob Iulo, the guide whose group I joined, told us how one woman on a tour had recognised the face of that doctor by the door frame. He had worked as a surgeon at Ellis Island from 1921 to 1922. He was her father.


Catherine Daly – herself the child of Irish immigrants ( to Boston) – is familiar with stories like that. She runs the American Family Immigration History Centre at the museum, where visitors – up to 200 groups a day – come to search ship manifests for their forebears. “You see families crying when they’ve found someone,” she told me. “Everyone who comes in has a great story of immigration.”


A Philadelphia man in his 80s, a federal court judge, had come in on the 100th anniversary of his father’s arrival. His father, as a boy, had been on the pier in Austria when a ship was leaving for New York. When another boy refused to get on, he asked if he could go instead. The judge, telling Catherine he had been born an American only by great good luck, added: “When I stepped on to the island today, I kissed the ground.”









Emigrants awaiting examination at Ellis Island, circa 1900

Credit: Getty







A third of immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island never went further than the city of New York. Many made their home in the area now known as the Lower East Side, still one of the most ethnically diverse parts of the city. At 97 Orchard Street stands a building that, between 1863 and 1935, served as home to nearly 7,000 immigrants from 20 countries. Since 1988 it has housed the Tenement Museum, which, with recreated apartments, tells the stories of immigrants beginning new lives.


I joined the “Irish Outsiders” tour to the home of the Moore family (unrelated to Annie, above), headed by Joseph and Bridget, who arrived in America in the 1860s. When they moved into the three-room apartment in 1868, their youngest girl, Agnes, was three months old. Bridget went down four flights of steps to fetch buckets of water from the tap beside the outside loos for cooking, cleaning and washing. Joseph, at a time when “No Irish need apply” signs were common, found work as a waiter, earning $20 a month; half of it went on rent.


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Fresh meat, fish and vegetables were plentiful, but milk often took days to reach them, and merchants added ammonia to it to mask sourness. When Agnes died the following year, and they needed $25 for a burial plot and coffin, they were visited by a representative of Tammany Hall, that Democratic party-political machine that offered aid in exchange for votes. Two days later, Agnes was buried.


The family moved to Queens and had five more children, three of whom died. Bridget died at 36; Joseph at an exceptional 71. Both their older daughters prospered, the second, Jane, managing with her husband to buy a home of her own. The Moores, having started like all immigrants as outsiders, were becoming insiders.



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Accommodation and transfers were arranged by Kirker Holidays (020 7593 2285,http://www.vivasanvivat.ru/news/2015-04-28-solnechnyi-ozhog-ili-zagar-bez-problem.html#comment-56877cheapjordanshoesfreeshipping.com/bolg; kirkerholidays.com), which offers three-night stays in New York from ?1,cheap jordans online,198. The price includes flights, private car transfers, b&b at the four-star Fifty NYC, notes on restaurants and sightseeing plus the services of a Kirker concierge.









Ellis Island can be visited only on the ferries of Statue Cruises

Credit: Getty







Ellis Island (nps.gov/elis) can be visited only on the ferries of Statue Cruises (001 201 604 2800; statuecruises.com; $18/,jordan shoes?14 return). A hard-hat tour of the hospital complex costs $35,cheap wholesale jordans.


The Tenement Museum (001 212 982 8420,Kicksokok.com; tenement.org) offers tours of the apartments at 97 Orchard Street ($25) and walking tours of the Lower East Side,cheap authentic jordans.


Further reading: American Passage: The History of Ellis Island by Vincent J Cannato (Harper Perennial); City of Dreams by Tyler Anbinder (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).



 
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