There’s hardly a soul in the U.S. that hasn’t heard of Ellis Island. It places prominently in all our school history books. Countless movies, books, and television series connect a character’s story to their family coming through there. Ellis is one of the most easily understood and visceral landmarks in the nation’s history. Today, the site is controlled and maintained by the National Parks Service, but the museum that most people visit is only one part of a sprawling complex on the 27 acre island. There’s an entire hospital along with support buildings that you can only visit through special Hard Hat Tours.
Please, believe me when I say that these tours are worth it.
Ellis Island Hard Hat Tours
The first thing you need to know about these tours is that their name isn’t playful, they require you to wear a hard hat when on the tour because of the environments you’ll be going through. These tours take you into areas that visitors are otherwise restricted from entering because the buildings are in a state of arrested decay. Tour guides will only take you to safe places in the complex, but they don’t want any unexpected stray piece to fall on your head.
There’s a real reason for protection on Ellis Island Hard Hat Tours.
On the tour, your guide will tell you about the history of the island, the immigrants that came through here, and what the buildings and the people in them did. Principally, the buildings you’ll see are tied to the hospital system that supported the immigration process. There are dormitories, industrial laundry facilities, quarantine buildings, even a surgery theater.
You’ll be part of a small group, which could mean as many as 30, but it could also mean just a handful. The tour we went on had just eight of us. The tours are emotional, giving names and sometimes faces to the real people that came through here. Sometimes their tales end in joy, others end in sorrow, and all journeys took deep courage. Perhaps most surprising of all the things I learned is how compassionate this system was.
I don’t want to imply that there wasn’t plenty of tragedy within the walls of Ellis, but hearing the lengths that the hospital workers went through to care for patients was inspiring. The sometimes terrible realities faced by people and the heart wrenching decisions made by family members is almost unfathomable. The fact that so much empathy existed for them by the staff charged to manage this entire process is admirable.
A Historical Primer On Ellis Island
Although Ellis Island’s immigration building was opened in 1892, its roots date back further in US history. It’s first recorded use was as a military fortification in the 1790s during rising tensions with Britain and France. Since the island’s natural state would have left it submerged at high tide, it’s unlikely that there were earlier permanent human uses. The U.S. military, though, did make good use of Ellis Island and it’s neighbor, which is now known as Liberty Island. They constructed forts on each of them which were important defensive structures in the war of 1812, helping to protect New York harbor. Although little remains of the original fortifications, the Statue of Liberty is constructed on one of them. Fort Wood, completed in 1811, now serves as the pedestal for the statue.
The military uses for the two islands faded following the U.S. Civil War and by 1890 the federal government took over immigration within the country. That same year, Congress ordered the construction of the first federal immigration site on Ellis Island. The fortifications were torn down and the first immigrant stations replaced them. It was completed in 1892 but burned down in 1897, fortunately there were no recorded casualties.
The second immigrant station was opened in 1900 – this time it was built to be fireproof, or at least more fireproof. This is the building that we are familiar with today, although it has been significantly expanded since its original construction. The first expansions included a ferry house, a hospital, and a kitchen with laundry facilities. Later expansions were made to include an contagious-disease ward, greenhouse, and even growing the island itself.
On an Ellis Island Hard Hat Tour, you’ll learn so much more about the history of the site.
Immigration to the island was in the hundreds of thousands per year from it’s opening until the outbreak of the First World War in 1915. During the war, immigration to the island collapsed to tens of thousands. Although immigration rebounded to more than half a million after the war ended, new and highly restrictive immigration laws were passed and brought about and end to the era of mass immigration.
There’s a great deal of important history that I’m glossing over and a great deal more that I haven’t even covered. Afterall, despite my history degree and training, my job, here and now, is not to give a seminar on Ellis and immigration history, despite an intense desire to go on and on about interesting things that you likely didn’t know – like I bet that you haven’t heard about the Black Tom explosion that damaged the immigration station on Ellis and was caused by spies from Germany that set fire to a stockpile of munitions! It was the lar…
I’m being told that I should stop by my editor.
As I was saying, my job is to entice you to travel to interesting places. It’s the job of the guides on the Hard Hat Tours on Ellis Island to tell you all about the fascinating history. Seriously, though, I’m leaving a lot out on purpose because that’s the point of the tour!
Why Should You Take The Tour?
If you care about the preservation of Ellis Island and the facilities on it, you should do one of these tours. The proceeds go to Save Ellis Island, a National Park Service partner whose goal and purpose is to preserve and restore the 29 buildings on the south end of the island. As surprising as it may seem today, most of the island’s facilities were abandoned after its closure in 1954 when it had been serving as a detention facility and military complex once again.
Ellis Island Hard Hat Tours are an activity that fills your soul!
The structures sat there, exposed to the elements for nearly twenty years. During that time, there were multiple proposals to redevelop the island into private use for high rise residential or hotel accommodations. All of those fell through. In the mid-1960s, though, the National Park Service proposed to redevelop the island into a national monument and, although the Johnson administration liked the idea and pursued it, nothing happened during that time. It wasn’t until the 1970s when any renovations began by the NPS and only a hundred or so visitors were allowed on the island each day.
It wasn’t until 1990 that the main building was renovated to the point that it was reopened to visitors. Not long after additional renovations allowed the north side of the building to reopen. The original ferry building was renovated as well and it was opened to visitors in 2007. It took 30 years to reopen three-ish buildings. Yes, they are large buildings, but it was 30 years. There are 29 more buildings on the island that haven’t been restored.
Now, the mission of Save Ellis Island isn’t, necessarily, to restore every building in the same way the main building has been. Right now the mission is to bring the other buildings into a state of arrested decay and preserve them from falling into further disrepair. As you might imagine, that takes a fair amount of time and resources. By taking one of these Hard Hat Tours, you help support that effort. You get to personally help support the preservation of American History, you learn things you never knew, and go to places you never thought you could go.
At least for me, personally, I literally cannot think of anything else I would rather do than those three things.
