Curate Your Own Adventure

A lot has happened since my last post. We left New York for Atlanta, spent a few days exploring Atlanta, and are now heading further south to Charleston and Savannah. There are a couple of museums and heritage places I still want to review from New York. And maybe one or two from Atlanta. For New York, I definitely want to write about the Ellis Island Hard Hat Tour and the Tenement Museum. This post will focus on Ellis Island and our experience of their Hard Hat Tour offering.

Overview of Ellis Island Immigration Museum

Between 1892 and 1954, just over 12 million immigrants passed through Ellis Island, hoping to become American citizens. Today, the original processing building is now the Ellis Island Immigration Museum. The museum has a variety of exhibitions currently on display that tell a diversity of stories. You can also visit the Registry Room, a hall where new arrivals waited to be inspected and registered. If you are short on time, I recommend seeing the Registry Room and visiting the exhibition Through America’s Gate.

This is a fantastic place to start as it guides you step-by-step through the immigration experience. The exhibition is spread throughout legal hearing rooms and detention quarters that have been restored to their 1918 appearance. Each room displays a different theme, including one titled Six-Second Specialists. In this room you can learn about the medical examination of new arrivals and see objects such as a buttonhook that was used during eye examinations. Doctors would lift someone’s eyelid with the hook looking for signs of trachoma – an infectious disease that causes blindness.

Moving through there are some intriguing objects and great contextualising graphics such as the one photographed below.

The rest of this post is going to focus on the medical processes and inspections. Those who didn’t pass the initial inspection and further medical examinations were sent to the hospital. If the disease or disability was determined to be incurable, their application was rejected and they had to return to their point of origin. Today, the only way to access the hospital buildings is on the Hard Hat Tour. I say buildings because there were two hospitals – one for general and one for infectious/contagious diseases.

Hard Hat Tour

In total, the Hard Hat Tour lasts around 90 minutes and visits the Ellis Island Hospital sites located on the south side of the island. After a short introduction, we put on our hard hats and ventured into the ruins. The reason for hard hats is for the safety of visitors, as some of the areas you walk through are pretty rustic. I’m going to take you through a few sections of the tour sharing photographs and some comments. Even if you’re not as interested in all things medical, I would still recommend this tour. Not just for the behind-the-scenes feel, but throughout the tour you can see an art exhibit, ‘Unframed – Ellis Island’, by artist JR. These are pastings or blown up archival images glued to the walls. I’ll make sure to share some of these artworks.

The tour begins in the laundry room, where over 3 000 pieces of laundry were washed each day. There is still quite a bit of equipment remaining including the large washers.

After leaving the laundry, we spent some time outside viewing the facade of the general hospital and psychiatric ward. From here, we walked down to the hospital for contagious and infectious diseases.

In this section of the tour, you follow the spine of the hospital, or the corridor that linked all the wards and rooms together. One of these rooms functioned as a morgue and a place for autopsies. The original mortuary cabinet still remains. You can see from the photograph that the room was also used for teaching. Doctors from around America could visit Ellis Island, witness an autopsy, and learn about new and different diseases.

After leaving the morgue, we continued down the spine to one of the wards. In here we learnt about how infectious diseases were managed and what original social distancing and air filtration methods were applied.

To finish the tour we visited one of the surgery rooms where there are a couple of JP pastings on the wall.

This is truly just a brief overview of the entire tour. If you are visiting Ellis Island, definitely consider adding this tour to your list. Please note there are accessibility restrictions.