Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [588]
Besides the din and disorder and sheer misery of it all, large numbers of those coming ashore had been exposed to typhus, cholera, smallpox, and other infectious diseases that ran rampant on immigrant ships. Under state legislation dating back to the 1790s, the visibly sick should have been dropped off at the marine hospital in Tompkinsville, Staten Island, until doctors certified their fitness to enter the city. Many captains regarded the law as a time-consuming nuisance and either ignored it altogether or surreptitiously landed passengers in places like Perth Amboy, New Jersey, from where they easily made their way to Manhattan.
When city authorities proved unwilling or unable to provide even minimal protection to the new immigrants, associations of older ones stepped forward. The German Society set up an office on Fulton Street, and the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick busied itself with its compatriots’ problems. Most notably, the Irish Emigrant Society (1841) offered information about jobs and lodgings, filed complaints against charlatans, protested shipboard conditions, remitted money and prepaid tickets back to Ireland, and in 1850 established an Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank.
For all their energy, the private German and Irish organizations were quickly overwhelmed, and they demanded and got greater state support. In 1847, overcoming bitter opposition from politicians and would-be predators, they prevailed on Albany to create a Board of Commissioners of Emigration. The panel included the mayors of Brooklyn and New York, the presidents of the German and Irish Emigrant Societies, and six gubernatorial appointees (six of the original ten were members of the Friendly Sons). The legislature empowered the new board to organize and reform the entire process: inspecting inbound vessels, helping immigrants find work, and arranging food, lodging, and medical care for those who had been in America for Jess than the five-year naturalization period. Funds to pay for it all were gathered by taxing the captain of each arriving vessel a dollar per passenger.
The commission would receive considerable criticism in the coming years. More than a few members had vested interests of one kind or another in the immigrant traffic, and periodic investigations turned up evidence of persons in their care being victimized by poor medical care, bad food, and dirty lodgings. But overall the commissioners accomplished a great deal, starting with a mammoth emergency medical relief program for the thousands of arriving sick and destitute. In 1847 they set up the Emigrant Refuge and Hospital on Ward’s Island, rapidly expanding it from a handful of temporary buildings until by the mid-1850s it was the largest hospital complex in the world.
In 1855 the commissioners converted Castle Garden into the Emigrant Landing Depot. The nation’s first immigrant reception center significantly reduced the abuses to which newly arrived aliens had been subjected for years. After ships had passed through the Quarantine Station, six miles below the city, they anchored off the Castle Garden pier, where they were inspected by medical officers and customs officials, and their passengers were barged to the great stone rotunda. Here, clerks of the Emigration Commission supervised the collection and weighing of baggage, enforced uniform porters’ fees, steered travelers to approved agents of railroad and steamship companies, and maintained an