I began my book City with a sec­tion on the theme of Arrival. For me there is one place that sym­bol­is­es the hopes and fears of every­one who has ever arrived in a city, hop­ing to begin a new life: Ellis Island. Immi­grants were dealt with on Ellis Island from 1892. In the years to 1919, no less than twelve mil­lion peo­ple passed through this gate­way to Amer­i­ca. Near­ly half set­tled per­ma­nent­ly in New York City. It has been esti­mat­ed that almost 40% of Amer­i­cans have an ances­tor who passed through Ellis Island.

I vis­it­ed Ellis Island in 1998 as a tourist and found it a deeply evoca­tive space, with its unfor­get­table views of the soar­ing tow­ers of Man­hat­tan — the promised land, as one immi­grant, Jacob Riis, described it. For those who were turned away, this lit­tle island in the shad­ow of Lady Lib­er­ty became the ‘Island of Tears’, to quote a con­tem­po­rary jour­nal­ist.  But those who suc­cess­ful­ly passed the med­ical exam­i­na­tions and the ques­tion­ing (How much mon­ey do you have? Have you been in jail? Have you been an anar­chist?) were free to take the fif­teen-minute boat ride to the city of their dreams.

The mod­ernist writer Dju­na Barnes used a rather sin­is­ter image to describe the sight of New York from the water in her essay ‘The Hem of Man­hat­tan’ (1917):  ‘As we round­ed the Bat­tery, New York rose out of the water like a great wave that found it impos­si­ble to return again and so remained there in hor­ror, peer­ing out of the mil­lion win­dows men had caged it with’. As the new immi­grants, fresh from the trau­mat­ic expe­ri­ence of Ellis Island, approached the Barge Office at the south east cor­ner of Bat­tery Park, near Cas­tle Gar­den, they must have been awe-struck by the sky­line of Man­hat­tan, home to the world’s tallest build­ings. Their prayers had been answered and their dreams were about to come true. ‘I thought I was in heav­en,’ recalled one. ‘My God – was this a city on earth or a city in heav­en?’

In Hen­ry Roth’s nov­el Call It Sleep (1934), Genya Schearl watch­es New York from the fer­ry, after pass­ing through Ellis Island:

‘Before her the grimy cupo­las and tow­er­ing square walls of the city loomed up. Above the jagged roof tops, the white smoke, whitened and suf­fused by the slant­i­ng sun, fad­ed into the slots and wedges of the sky. She pressed her brow against her child’s, hushed him with whis­pers. This was that vast incred­i­ble land, the land of free­dom, of immense oppor­tu­ni­ty, that Gold­en Land.’

A bewil­der­ing array of emo­tions must have con­sumed those immi­grants as they pre­pared to step foot on Amer­i­can soil. Intense joy mixed with a grow­ing feel­ing of anx­i­ety. It was, after all, their first day in the New World.

You can view a full-colour sam­pler of the first sec­tion of City, includ­ing the essay on Ellis Island, here.