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Isle of Hope, Isle of Tears
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18149 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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11 / 1990 |
2,412 Words |
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Daniela Vincenti
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The year was 1921. A train whisked Teddy from his village on the green slopes of the Bernese Alps to the gray-blue French port of Le Havre. From there, he embarked on a boat bound for the United States, accompanied by Gertrude Schneider, his eleven-year-old owner.
Teddy (Bear) was five years old when he and Gertrude arrived at Ellis Island in New York harbor, the immigrants' portal to the New World - "Isle o Hope" to the robust but "Isle of Tears" to the incurably ill who were not allowed to remain.
Wearing a gray jumpsuit that Matti, Gertude's mother, had sewn for him, Teddy waited in the family trunk while the Schneiders passed through immigration. Once out of Ellis Island, Gertrude and her family settled in Cotekill, New York. Eventually she grew up and married, and Teddy was relegated to the attic.
But sixty-nine years later, Teddy has become an honored guest at New York's new Ellis Island immigration Museum. Gertrude Schneider Smith donated him to the collection in 1988. "I loved that teddy bear more than anything else," Gertrude said, trying to contain powerful emotions. "It was like giving him up for adoption, like giving up a child.”
Teddy was just one of the hundreds of personal effects donated to the museum by naturalized citizens. Many items were accompanied by substantial sums of money to help establish the first grand-scale immigration museum in the United States. Officials predict that the museum will host more than half a million visitors annually. "This museum is the glorification of a common experience," commented Paul Sigrist, director to the museum's oral history center.
Housed in a building though which twelve million immigrants passed between 1892 and 1924, the museum encompasses 100,000 square feet of exhibit space, two theaters, an oral history studio, and a library. The $156 million restoration was financed entirely by private donations, coming from about twenty million Americans, to the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, Inc. The National Park Service is administrator of the site.
A Forgotten History
The visitor to the U-shaped island arrives by ferry down a sycamore-lined channel past three small limestone and brick buildings, only own of which shows signs of renovation. The others lie in desperate decay, with their windows broken and masonry encrusted with soot. On the north side, facing Manhattan, the imposing ivory and coral main building stands newly cleaned, framed by four copper domed towers and reflected in the channel's waters. Carved stone shields and eagles flanking three enormous arched windows give it an imperious aspect.
"I don't know any other building in the world you can point to and say that through that building came twelve million people, from whom one hundred million more can trace their roots," said John Belle of Beyer Blinder Belle, the architectural firm that designed the restoration. Forty percent of all Americans have at least one ancestor who was processed through this point.
Ellis Island's three acres belonged originally to New York State, which has purchased them
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