Inside Ellis Island's restoration; next up: laundry
NewYorkology contributor Vidiot commits journalism by night and explores NYC by day. He's especially interested in the infrastructure, transit, architectural wonders, drinking establishments, and hidden corners of the greatest city in the world. Today he provides an update on the efforts to preserve the crumbling remains of Ellis Island's forgotten buildings.
NewYorkology visited Ellis Island recently to check on the progress of the renovations on the long-abandoned south side hospital of the immigration center.
The nonprofit Save Ellis Island has been working with the National Park Service (which owns the island) since 2001 to stabilize and ultimately renovate the 29 hospital buildings on the south side. Elizabeth Jeffery, Vice President of Planning and Capital Projects for SEI, took NewYorkology on a tour of the buildings, which remain off-limits to the public (except for the annual Open House NY treks, which SEI hopes to take part in again in October.)
The first portion of this massive undertaking -- the repair and reopening of the Ferry Building -- was completed in April and has been open for free Park Service tours a few days each week.
Leading from the Ferry Building to the hospital complex is an enclosed Y-shaped corridor made of red brick and arched windows. That area's also been recently renovated.
That Y-corridor leads to the Laundry/Hospital Outbuilding, which is next on the organization's repair list. SEI is currently bidding out contracts for renovation of the interior, and expects to have bids in in the next 30 days. Hopefully the renovation will be completed in 12 months.
The building still houses some fascinating industrial detritus, including a mangle and washers and driers from the hospital's laundry. It is slated to eventually hold exhibits relating to the hospital's support systems: the "city within a city" operations (laundry, power plant, kitchens, et cetera) that kept the large hospital running smoothly for decades. SEI's also working on raising money for the project, and currently has about half of the $1.6 million needed.
After the Laundry/Hospital Outbuilding renovation is completed, SEI will set its sights on renovating the recreational pavilion and the open space between the two main parts of the hospital. (That area, which was once a 200-foot-wide expanse of water separating the contagious-disease section of the hospital from the other buildings in the complex, was filled in during the 1920s.)
Eventually, SEI hopes to renovate the hospital's treatment buildings, operating rooms, staff quarters, and wards. The wards near the southwestern corner of the island housed the sickest patients -- the ones least likely to make it off the island alive. They were placed in the isolation wards farthest away from the main hospital, with windows providing a tantalizingly close view of the Statue of Liberty.
The hospital on Ellis's south side was built from 1900-1908 as one of the first -- and largest -- public health projects in U.S. history. Immigrants who did not pass medical checks (approximately 2 percent of those arriving at Ellis Island) were sent to the hospital. Of those, 98 percent of the hospital's patients were eventually admitted to the United States after having been cured.
Save Ellis Island's goal is to open several of these hospital buildings to the public as exhibit space, and eventually to renovate all of the buildings and open them as the Ellis Island Institute and Conference Center, which would host conferences focusing on issues related to migration and public health.
As Elizabeth Jefferys put it, "there's a lot more going on here than just the museum, and we have big plans."
SEI and the NPS have completed stabilization on all of the buildings on the south side of the island, a massive undertaking that involved removing undergrowth (including stalks of "poison ivy as big around as your wrist"), repairing roofs, hauling away mountains of junk, and sealing windows and doors so water can't enter the buildings.
But until all that's complete the only "new" area regularly open to the public is the Ferry Building. The Art Deco-style ferry terminal built in 1936 was most immigrants' last stop on the island; immigrants who had successfully been admitted to the United States waited here for ferries to New York or New Jersey. (The wreck of the Ellis Island, one of these passenger ferries, has lain in the ferry slip since it was sunk by a storm in 1968. The side of the hull is still visible at low tide -- until the Army Corps of Engineers removes it.)
Restoration on the ferry building started in 2002, with a $2 million National Park Service project to restore the building's exterior, and SEI raised $4 million to renovate the interior. The interior renovations, which took place in 2006 and 2007, were tricky, as workers had to remove asbestos, particularly in the undercrofts and crawl spaces of the building where the asbestos insulation was sopped by tidal flow, creating a huge gloppy mess.
The spaces in the ferry building now feel brand-new: the original terrazzo floor is polished and looks like it was laid yesterday, and the rooms are filled with exhibits about the hospital. Occupying pride of place is an electric fan dating from the building's construction in 1936 that, after having been cleaned up a bit, is still in working order. Also, a bench original to the building still sits alongside one wall, and a newly-constructed twin. (SEI had to hire Amish carpenters to exactly replicate the solid construction of the white oak bench.) The Ferry Building is also being used for meeting space, and Save Ellis Island is running workshops and seminars for teachers.
The one part of Ellis Island that's always open to tourists is the north side, where the beautifully restored 107-year-old Main Building houses the Ellis Island Immigration Museum. It's been open to the public in one form or another since 1976.
