American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [14]
New York City was to become the commercial fulcrum of the new nation, connecting the booming Midwest with the markets of Europe and beyond. In the thirty-five years after the opening of the canal, Manhattan’s population went from 123,000 to 813,000. During that same period, 60 percent of all imports and one-third of all exports passed through the Port of New York.
New York imported woolen and cotton clothing from the factories of England, and expensive silk, lace, ribbons, gloves, and hats for upscale female shoppers. Sugar, coffee, and tea also came through the port. Much as New York monopolized the import of these goods, it also led the way in another kind of European import: immigrants.
Between 1820 and 1860, 3.7 million immigrants entered through the portal of New York Harbor—some 70 percent of all immigrants to the United States during this time. Those ships streaming up the Narrows into New York Harbor, packed with immigrants, would keep coming throughout the nineteenth century, but to those newcomers Ellis Island meant nothing.
For the next few decades, Ellis Island would exist in relative obscurity, used by the army and the navy mostly as a munitions depot. Destined to be little more than a footnote in the city’s history, the island did have a front row seat for the unfolding drama that took place across the harbor on the island of Manhattan. It stood watch as a small city began evolving into an urban colossus.
For immigrants coming to New York in the second half of the nineteenth century, the words on their lips were not Ellis Island, but Castle Garden.
Chapter 2
Castle Garden
The present management of this very important department [Castle Garden] is a scandal and reproach to civilization. —Governor Grover Cleveland, 1883
Castle Garden is one of the most beneficent institutions in the world.
—Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, June 1884
ON A HO T AUGUST NIGHT IN 1855, A LINE OF OIL LAMPS lit the early evening sky on lower Broadway in Manhattan. Torch-bearing New Yorkers proceeded down the short hill, past Bowling Green, the tiny oval patch of grass surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, and into the Battery. It was a joyous and raucous affair, part political protest and part social outing, with loud shouting, fireworks, and even the firing of cannons as the crowd marched around the Battery carrying banners in German and English. By the time they had arrived, their numbers had grown to some three thousand people.
These men, women, and children were responding to an advertisement that had been posted around the city:
INDIGNATION MEETING!
citizens of the first ward
Assemble in your Might, and vindicate your Rights! citizens
Do you wish to have
plague and cholera in your midst!
Do you wish to have your Children laid low with Small Pox
and Ship Fever?
New-yorkers
Will we have our most honored and sacred spot desecrated by the sickly and loathsome Paupers and Refugees of European Workhouses and Prisons?
Populist mobs were a regular feature in American cities dating back to revolutionary-era protests like those over the Stamp Act. Indignation meetings allowed citizens to blow off steam and flex their collective muscles to authorities.
The object of the crowd’s indignation on this night was the recent opening of a brand-new immigration depot on a rocky outcropping just off the Battery and connected to it by a footbridge. Castle Garden stood on the site of a fort built in 1811 as part of the defensive fortifications of New York Harbor. When the Marquis de Lafayette visited America in 1824, he first arrived at the fort, where more than five thousand guests welcomed him.
The old fort was later converted into a music hall where Jenny Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale,” made her American debut in 1850 as part of her cross-country tour financed and publicized