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Museum of the City of New York
A lithograph showing Castle Garden around 1852.
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Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times
The
150th anniversary of the Castle Garden immigration station will be celebrated with a
concert Sunday.
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On Sunday, the Battery Conservancy
will celebrate the anniversary with a free concert from 4:30 to 10 p.m. at
Castle Clinton, the former fort, concert hall and immigration station that is
run by the National Park Service and is part of the National Parks of New York
Harbor.
On Monday, Warrie Price, the
founder and president of the conservancy, a nonprofit group formed to rebuild
the 23-acre park, will also begin a free Web site for scholarly and genealogical
research,
CastleGarden.org, which includes a database of more than 10
million of the 12 million immigrants who arrived at the Port of New York from
1820 to 1892.
The Web site, an electronic
archive and a research center constitute the Battery Conservancy's Center for
Castle Garden Immigration.
Ms. Price will also officially
inaugurate the Bosque fountain, the capstone of an $8.5 million renovation
financed by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. A restored statue
honoring immigrants and donated by the Rudin real estate family will be
rededicated.
Before the War of 1812, a circular
brownstone fort called the Southwest Battery was built on the rocks off
Manhattan Island. In 1817, it was renamed Castle Clinton in honor of DeWitt
Clinton, who was the mayor and then the governor. The fort was abandoned by the
Army four years later without a shot ever fired at an enemy.
The fort, where the nation bade
farewell to the Marquis de Lafayette, later welcomed Jenny Lind, the
"Swedish Nightingale," after the addition of a roof allowed it to be
expanded into an opera house and theater.
Meanwhile, in 1820, Congress began
requiring records to be kept of passenger manifests, ostensibly to monitor
whether ship owners were overloading their vessels. But the arrival process
remained chaotic. Immigrants were besieged at the docks by agents - many of
them unscrupulous - representing or claiming to represent boardinghouses,
employers, railroads and other entrepreneurs who had designs on the newcomers'
savings.
So in 1855, the state transformed
the site from a concert hall to an immigration station.
Researchers said they were unable
to verify the name of the first passenger processed, but John Celardo, an
archivist with the National Archives and Records Administration in New York,
said the first one listed on the manifest for the largest of the first five
ships that ferried their passengers to Castle Garden from the British Queen,
which sailed from Bristol, was a 30-year-old laborer from England named Richard
Richards. Castle Garden was connected to the mainland by landfill and
surrounded by a 13-foot-high fence to keep the unscrupulous agents out.
Newcomers could register, be examined, eat, bathe and arrange for lodging and
for transportation for themselves and their baggage before leaving to settle in
the city or to travel to other destinations.
"Now, if the emigrant desires
to stop in the city," The New York Times reported a few days after Castle
Garden was reincarnated in 1855, "he may leave his luggage, to be called
for when wanted, and issuing out at the narrow front gate, saunter up Broadway,
and squat, or rent, or buy and build as suits his own sweet will - he is
already a prospective American citizen and has the freedom of the city or the
land." Most, the paper noted, "are wise enough to push on where they
will be welcomed - to the West."
Between 1855 and 1890, about eight
million immigrants, mostly Germans, Irish, English, Scots, Swedes, Danes,
Russians and Italians, passed through Castle Garden. Immigration was virtually
unrestricted until 1875, when Congress barred convicts and prostitutes. An 1882
law excluded anyone convicted of a political offense, lunatics, idiots and
persons likely to become public charges and imposed a 50-cent tax on every
immigrant who arrived by boat.
In 1890, 450,394 passengers were
recorded as passing though Castle Garden. Of those, 364,086 were immigrants.
According to the records, 155 had died en route.
In 1896, the castle was transformed
into the New York Aquarium. It was largely demolished in the early 1940's for
an approach to a Battery-to-Brooklyn bridge that was never built.
Preservationists persuaded Congress to declare the original fort walls a
national monument.
Original records of the arrivals,
which are also available on microfilm at the National Archives and Records
Administration, Northeast Region, in Manhattan, were lent by the archives to
create what Ms. Price of the Battery Conservancy described as the first
noncommercial digitized database of immigrants that covers almost all the 19th
century. The archive was compiled by Ira Glazier, an ethnic historian.
According to an analysis of census
calculations by Joseph P. Ferrie, professor of economic history at Northwestern
University, about 30 percent of native-born Americans are descended from
immigrants who arrived between 1820 through 1892 through the Port of New York.
About 18 percent are related to immigrants who came through Castle Garden and 9
percent to arrivals at Ellis Island during its peak, from 1892 to 1924.
Scholars and genealogy buffs will
now be able to mine the immigration records since 1820 as deeply as they have
the trove of arrivals at Ellis Island (at
ellisisland.org)
through 1924. They know, for instance the first at Ellis Island was 15-year-old
Annie Moore, an Irish immigrant from County Cork, whose family moved to 32
Monroe Street in Lower Manhattan and then to Texas, where she was killed by a
trolley in 1923. (Her great-grandson, Edward A. Wood, is a plumbing contractor
in New Jersey.)
The last person processed at Ellis
Island was Arne Petterssen, a Norwegian seaman who was sent home 50 years ago
for overstaying his work permit.
