Ellis Island Immigrant Hospital
December 29th, 2014 by Mr. C
(To the left was the general hospital – To the right, infectious diseases – left we went!)
Last weekend I had the privilege to go on a ‘Hard Hat’ tour of the abandoned hospital complex on Ellis Island. I had first learned about the tour through Nick Carr of Scouting New York, who is a professional movie location scout in New York. His job is to stare and take notice of NYC locations with more of an eagle eye for architectural aesthetics. He has an excellent web site called what else, Scouting NY and he documents what he experiences in the NYC, surrounding areas, & sometimes beyond which most of us overlook in our everyday travels. Scouting New York is one of my favorite web sites to catchup with in all things NYC! Go see for yourself!
Most people only associate one main building formerly known as the Ellis Island Great Hall which was a pre-process location for all incoming immigrants from 1892-1924. This building was restored in 1986 and reopened as the Ellis Island Immigration Museum. The hard hat tour that I went on actually took us to the Immigrant hospital which served as a detention center for immigrants that were deemed not healthy or unfit. They would get treated and either released to their new life in the Americas or deported depending on the situation. There was an insane asylum in the premises as well for those that they thought were unfit for society. The criteria for being tagged for being insane seemed to be very subjective and discriminatory. What a scary thought! The Hospital grounds housed overe 20 buildings. There are at least 3 main wings of the building: one was the general hospital, one for infectious diseases, and the other was the psychiatric ward. The psychiatric ward was too unsafe and dilapidated to get to.
The grounds have to be experienced first hand. Putting words together to describe the eery feeling when walking through the silent hallways and rooms of this abandoned campus that once housed desperate folks looking for a better life does not do it justice. We walked through the morgue and amphitheater where autopsies were performed and wow! Ellis Island recently opened up the hospital grounds in October 2014 for these small group hard hat tours. French artist JR has site specific art installations throughout the hospital called “Unframed – Ellis Island” in which these historic images from Ellis Island’s past is brought back to life to mingle with the crumbling state of the hospital to form a memory from the past. The tour guide mentioned that JR is working with Robert Deniro to film a short documentary on the hospital grounds. Check out the Hospital grounds yourself on one of the hard hat tours on Ellis Island while you can! Help preserve a piece of American History! Tickets for the tours here.
Above & below are some photos that I captured on the tour to help put an image together of the hospital that once was from 1902-1930.
(Laboratory to test on animals)
(Morgue)
(Amphitheater/Autopsy)
(Detention Center)
Tags: ellis island hospital, new york city
Posted in mr. c, photos | Comments (0)
