Twice in the 1890s the front door to America was a customs building at the foot of Whitehall Street, on the east edge of Battery Park. The Barge Office, a granite Romanesque building with towers designed by James G. Hill and finished in 1882, was built for customs inspectors to check the baggage of steamship passengers. When Castle Garden closed in April 1890, immigrants were landed and examined at the Barge Office instead, until Ellis Island opened on 1 January 1892. Then, on the night of 14 June 1897, fire destroyed Ellis Island's wooden buildings, and processing moved back to the Barge Office for three and a half years. In the year to June 1898 more than 178,000 immigrants landed at New York, upward of five hundred a day, and most of them were examined there.
In 1891 one couple was even married inside. The rebuilt Ellis Island station opened on 17 December 1900. Hill's building was demolished in 1911 and replaced by a larger Barge Office, which itself was razed around 1942 when Robert Moses rebuilt Battery Park and dug the Battery Park Underpass, and workers found the old granite foundation in the trench. The site, by the short stub of South Street at the park's edge, is now taken by a government building and a harbourside restaurant, beside the Staten Island Ferry's Whitehall Terminal. The Battery Maritime Building next door is a different building, a ferry terminal of 1909.
Getting there
40.7011, -74.0143
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