Lorie Conway - Forgotten Ellis Island: The Extraordinary Story of Americas Immigrant Hospital

FORGOTTEN
ELLIS ISLAND

The Extraordinary Story of Americas Immigrant Hospital

LORIE CONWAY

CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHRIS BARNES

This book is lovingly dedicated to my son, Max George, whose great-grandfather Edward Conway immigrated to America in 1900 at the age of 18. Arriving at Ellis Island from Ballina, Ireland, he had two dollars in his pocket and listed his occupation as laborer. By 1915, he was already living the American dreamhe had a family, owned a home, and in one photo, a derby hat sits jauntily on his head, his Irish eyes smiling as if he had not a care in the world. May my son Max fulfill his own dream, wherever that may lead him.

T HE FORGOTTEN STORY OF THE IMMIGRANT HOSPITAL ON ELLIS ISLAND HAS BEEN A PART OF MY LIFE SINCE 1998. A FRIEND REMARKED: ITS AS IF SOMEONE TAPPED YOU ON the shoulder and said, Your mission is to tell this story.

My story began when I called Frank Mills, deputy superintendent at the site of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, asking about the possibility of creating a documentary film on the history of the massive, abandoned hospital complex. My interest had been kindled by a New York Times Magazine article that described Ellis Island as being as close to a national shrine as we have in America while suggesting at the same time that a major part of its history the hospital story had not been told. Speaking a few days later with a National Park Service representative, I learned that no book or film had been produced about the hospital despite its intriguing history. In its day, the hospital was one of the worlds great and most modern. Yet, within five decades after being built, it was virtually abandoned.

Starting in 1999, the National Park Service gave my production company exclusive access for a year to film the hospital buildings. Today, they are undergoing restoration and will eventually include a public health museum and an immigration institute. When we filmed them, however, the buildings were laced with poison ivy, loose asbestos, and flaking lead paint. A tree had taken root in the cracked linoleum floor outside one of the operating rooms. In rain and snow, at dawn and at dusk, from the ground and from helicopter, we captured images of the hospital everything from the psychopathic hospital and autopsy amphitheater to the contagious disease hospital and diagnostic laboratory. As we filmed, we thought about the thousands of immigrant patients who had peered through the windows at the Statue of Liberty as they lay in the white iron beds lining the wards. The filming of two former patients at the hospital location brought the institution even further to life. As one of them walked through the hospital, where he had been admitted as a five-year-old boy newly arrived from France, he recalled the anxiety he felt as his mother was told she could not remain with him.

The idea of being the first to research this forgotten chapter of Ellis Islands history has carried me through a long and sometimes frustrating effort. My search took me through dusty files at the National Archives, the New York Public Library, the Public Health Archives, Ellis Island Library, Widener Library at Harvard, and other institutions. As it happens, there is no central repository of the hospitals records, despite tantalizing hints that they might be found in federal archives in Washington or Louisiana or Colorado. Nevertheless, the hospitals story slowly came together piece by piece. Paging through the personal scrapbooks of William Williams, a two term Ellis Island commissioner, I discovered a man ambivalent about immigration but determined to build a hospital for immigrants and convinced that the patients should be treated with kindness and consideration. A month before this manuscript went to the publisher, the family of Ormond McDermott, a 19-year-old who died in the hospital of scarlet fever, was located in Sydney, Australia. His medical record was one of the few to survive after the hospital was abandoned. Five years after discovering Ormonds file, I finally had a face to attach to the medical notes that charted his last days alive.

While researching the hospitals history, I discovered that todays immigration controversies are not markedly different from those of a century ago. The faces of todays newcomers differ, but the arguments for and against their entry have changed little from those aired in the early 1900s. Even the themes and images of the editorial cartoons of that earlier era resemble those in todays periodicals. Immigration is a timeless American story, and I consider myself fortunate to be able to tell a part of it.

The main reason for telling the hospitals story, however, is for its merit as a publicly funded institution. During the hospitals busiest years, from 1902-1930, immigrants who arrived in America with diseases were treated with suspicion but also with kindness and with care. The doctors of the U.S. Public Health Service had a twofold mission to heal the sick but also to protect the nation from the diseases the immigrants carried. The hospital was not a perfect place. An unknown number of new arrivals were deported for medical diagnoses based more on how true Americans were supposed to look and act than on the threat they posed to the public health. But a much larger number of immigrantstens of thousandswere restored to health in the hospital and granted entry after having initially been disqualified for medical reasons. There were also fortunate accidents of birth 350 immigrant babies were born at the hospital, automatically becoming U.S. citizens.

These and other stories make up the forgotten history of the Ellis Island Hospital. It is a history lost to all but the generation that lived it. This book seeks to change that reality.

IT WAS A GENERAL HOSPITAL OF ALL NATIONS.

No man would invite a person afflicted with a contagious disease beneath his roof, to mingle with members of his own family. Rather would he shield his family from contact with disease; and as the nation is but a larger family every citizen should do his part, use his influence, to safeguard the homes of the poor of the United States against disease from abroad.