Ellis Island Immigration Museum

Abstract

On May 1, 2012, the Organization of American Historians (OAH) report Imperiled Promise: The State of History in the National Park Service urged the National Park Service (NPS) “to recommit to history,” bemoaning its inadequate treatment at park historical sites. Focusing on the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration (part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument), this review essay considers how much has changed at one site in response to the report’s call to action. The Ellis Island immigration station opened in 1892. When it closed in 1954, the facility had processed nearly twelve million immigrants, the great majority of whom arrived during the peak immigration period between 1880 and 1924. In 1990, when the restored Main Building opened as a National Park Service immigration museum, it quickly became a major national and international tourist attraction. To access the island, visitors take a twenty-minute ferry ride from Battery Park in Lower Manhattan or a fifteen-minute ride from Liberty State Park in Jersey City, New Jersey. Entrance to the museum, as well as to both Ellis Island and Liberty Island, is free. Approximately 4.5 million people visited annually before the pandemic (and numbers are rising again), and although all get off at Liberty Island (the first stop), only about half go on to visit Ellis Island. Still, the nearly 2.2 million annual visitors to Ellis Island, about half of whom are foreign tourists, make it among the National Park Service’s most widely attended history museums. When I visited in the summer of 2021, COVID-19 restrictions had eased and tourists were returning to the island in large numbers; however, video kiosks were still not running, film programs in the two theaters were paused, and park ranger tours remained suspended. I had reviewed the museum nearly fifteen years earlier for an edited volume on how race and empire are implicated in public history sites, noting the absence of attention to how Black migration would frame the experience of immigrants to northern American cities.1 Returning several times since then to participate in summer seminars on public health at Ellis Island’s decayed hospital complex on the island’s adjacent landfill, I was familiar with the museum’s core