It is “America’s classic immigrant cityFoner, 2007
” and as such has been profoundly shaped by successive waves of immigration over the last four centuries.
New York is also home to hundreds of museumsTripAdvisor lists 344 museums in NYC, monuments, and memorials, many of which reflect this immigrant history and address issues stemming from or otherwise relating to immigration.
I looked at five of these sites which present information about immigration to New York.
The rest of this website will detail:
Ellis Island was the United States’ busiest immigration processing station, which between 1892 and 1924 processed approximately 12 million immigrants entering the USMaddern, 2004, page 303. It is now home to the National Museum of Immigration, which tells the story of immigration to the US, specifically focusing on those whose journeys took them through the island.
Before Ellis Island opened to new arrivals, the country’s official immigrant processing center was at Castle Clinton (aka Castle Garden), which from 1855 to 1890 processed 8 million immigrants: two out of every three immigrants to the United States in the period. It, like Ellis Island, is now a National Monument run by the National Park Service.
The Irish Hunger Memorial is unique amongst the sites visited in that it is not a museum, but rather “a large, multisensory public sculpturePletneva Veller, 2012, page iii” commemorating the 1845 to 1852 Great Irish Famine, in which about one million people died and a million more emigrated from Ireland, primarily to the United StatesRoss, 2002, page 226.
The Museum at Eldridge Street is housed in the Eldridge Street Synagogue, built in 1887 for the then-growing community of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who had settled on the Lower East Side. After its original congregation left the area the synagogue fell into disrepair, before being reopened in 2007 following a twenty-year-long restoration project.
The Tenement Museum tells the stories of the immigrants who lived in the historic tenement buildings at 97 and 103 Orchard Street. Visitors to the museum tour the recreated apartments (and lager beer saloon) “to learn the powerful stories of the immigrants who built new lives, weathered hard times, and cleared the path for generations of Americans to comeTenement Museum: 97 Orchard Street”.
