How do the places influence the narratives?

Each of the sites tells their visitors different narratives about immigration and immigrants. Many of these narratives are influenced to a large extent by where they’re being told: the location of the site and its broader history.

Immigration narratives are not aspatial, and are frequently linked to specific locations. Pierre Nora described these as ‘lieux de mémoire’, or ‘sites of memory’, and defined these as “any significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any communityNora, 1996, page xvii”.

The sites vary in the extent to which the attraction is more the curated content, for example the exhibits on the lives immigrants led before and after immigrating on Ellis Island; or the building/location itself, for example the Eldridge Street Synagogue. At the Synagogue, visitor experience is primarily focused on the experience of being in the building in person: the informational displays (located in the basementTechnically, in the downstairs beth midrash.) seemed an addendum to the main sanctuary upstairs.

The precise narratives told at the Tenement Museum are specific to the buildings themselves: the stories told are those of the actual people who previously lived in the tenements.

The influence of place can go beyond simple historical recreations of a certain site. Brian Tolle’s Irish Hunger Memorial draws much of its visual potency from the fact that it is “an Irish landscape that has been removed from its native surroundings and inserted into the urban environment of Lower ManhattanPletneva Veller, 2012 page iii”:

“The deliberate incongruity of the memorial in downtown Manhattan is designed to signal ‘a combined past and present’, featuring a recognizable scene from today’s rural Ireland, along with its past associations, in a memorial designed also to focus on continuing international hunger.”
— Kelleher, 2002, page 269

Equally, the influence of place on the scope of the narratives told at the site can be logistical. This can be seen in a comparison of the information provided at Ellis Island with that at Castle Clinton. Ellis Island is designed as a day out, requiring a 30-minute ferry to get there and providing hours’ worth of information within the museum. Castle Clinton, on the other hand, is located at the southern tip of Manhattan nearby many other attractions, and as such is seen much more as a site that visitors might visit for a shorter duration. As most visitors to Ellis Island will be spending several hours at the site, they are able to go into much more detail in their retelling of immigrant narratives, compared to the average visitor to Castle Clinton who may only be there for a few minutes and who will therefore take away much less information from the site.


Now click here to look at the ways in which the narratives are told through the places.