42785SilverFox
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For millions of poor Europeans the dream was America, and the door to the dream was Ellis Island. It is still there: twenty-seven acres of rock in Upper New York Bay, not far from the Statue of Liberty, southwest of the bottom of Manhattan. Originally called Gibbet Island when pirate was hanged there in 1769, it later was renamed after its then owner, Samuel Ellis. Around 1800 the new nation turned it into a fort; the federal government took it over, and for most of the nineteenth century it was known as Fort Gibson. After the Civil War it became an ammunition dump. But in 1892 the deluge of immigrants pouring into America forced its conversion into an immigration station. The original wooden buildings burned in 1897 and a new complex of brick buildings was opened in 1900. It was through the main building, called simply enough the Reception Center, that the grandparents of perhaps a third of present-day Americans passed during the peak years before the First World War. Processing as many as five thousand immigrants a day, the government doctors and inspectors treated the would-be Americans with considerable humanity. Nevertheless, the prospect of passing through the Immigration Center-and the possibility of rejection-struck such terror in the hearts of immigrants that it was known to many as the Island of Tears. Today, it is a wreck and relic. Closed by the government in 1954 and put up for sale, it was left unguarded for ten years, during which time vandals rowed over from the mainland to steal the hardware, the copper flashing from the roof-whatever was not nailed down. Years of leaking roofs crumbled the old plaster; now, parts of the building are unsafe. But one can still wander through the Great Hall and many of it's adjacent rooms. Here amidst the debris stands an old upright piano. There, an ancient Singer sewing machine that might once have been used by some peasant woman to mend the torn shirt of her son as they waited to be processed.…