Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Just across the water from Liberty Island,
Ellis Island
became an immigration station in
1892. It was the first stop for more than twelve million immigrants, all steerage-class pas-
sengers, and today some one hundred million Americans can trace their roots here. Closed
in 1954, it reopened in 1990 as a
Museum of Immigration
, an ambitious project that elo-
quently recaptures the spirit of the place with artefacts, photographs, maps, and personal
testimonies of the immigrants who passed through. On the first floor, the excellent perman-
ent exhibit, “Peopling of America”, chronicles four centuries of immigration, while the
huge, vaulted Registry Room upstairs has been left imposingly bare.
