Exploring Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty - With Justin Southern

0:00This episode of the New Yorkers podcast is brought to you by NewYork100.org. recognizing excellence across New York City's five boroughs. Hello, everyone, and welcome to The New Yorkers, a podcast by New York City Cop. I'm your host, Kelly Copp, published photographer, New York City tour business owner, real estate content creator, podcaster, and above all else, a New Yorker. Ladies and gentlemen, the next booklet about Trace is now high. Stand clear of the closing doors, please.

0:44This is a time square.

1:03Welcome back to the New Yorker's podcast, my friends. Today, I am joined by my friend Justin Southern, who leads the incredible hardhat tours at Ellis Island. He has a wealth of knowledge about immigration, NYC history, and the untold stories of the iconic landmark at Ellis Island. Justin, thanks for being here, my friend. How are you today? Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm doing well. Yeah, it's an honor to have you here. You know, I spent, you guys spent, it was about a week or two ago, spent an afternoon with Justin. Yeah, yeah. Out at Ellis Island. We had a great time. It was a great day. So tell us about yourself.

1:40I want the audience to get to know you a little. Yeah, I am. Originally, I'm from Alabama. I've lived in New York for about six years, but I have lived in several places, including in Texas for a little while, in Philadelphia. I lived abroad in Rome where I led tours for a few years. What brought you to Rome? I did a study abroad program in Rome, and then after I graduated, decided I wanted to spend a year abroad learning Italian and teaching English. I was a very terrible English teacher. But I did find my way into the tour. That's hilarious. How can you be a bad English teacher if you speak such great English?

2:21You don't have to. I don't even know how to answer that. I made a lady cry in my first 15 minutes of my very first lesson. Really? Yeah. I tell the story a lot, but she, I'd been told that she was, I don't know how much this is relevant to the Save-O-Sylent, but I'm just going to run with it. Yeah. But I got a job for a school and I was going to different banks and telecommunication companies and doing private lessons with different executive staff members. And this first lesson that I had, I'd been off the plane for three, four days. I was still jet lagged and I went in. I had developed a very comprehensive lesson plan trying to do an hour and a half long lesson on the eight parts of speech because I thought she had studied English before.

3:08It turns out she was a very much a beginner. And as I go through each of these eight parts of speech, I was, I mean, I'm sweating, sweating, you know, bullets here. And she eventually, she kept nodding. I said, have you learned this before? Do you know this? And she's saying, see, see, see. And eventually, I got through all eight parts of the speech and started in like 15 minutes. I got through all eight parts of the speech in 15 minutes. And I started panicking, thinking, what am I supposed to do now? And so I improvised and started talking about non-quantifiable versus quantifiable nouns. Nice.

3:48Yeah. If you don't know, that would be - That's the first thing I would go to, too. Yeah, exactly. I don't know why that popped into my head, but there I was, so nervous. I was 23 years old. And, you know, the difference, if you don't know, is like, you know, water is a non-quantifiable noun. You can't count water. But bottles of water, you can count. It's a quantifiable noun. So I started talking about that. And she stopped me. She said, aspetta. It means wait. Yeah. And she went and got this big dictionary, you know, Italian-English dictionary, and set it in front of me and opened it up to a page.

4:22and she pointed out a word and she said, I am, and the word was demoralized. Demoralized? Demoralized. And then she started crying. Aw. And we had a nice little heart-to-heart. I explained in my little Pidgekin Italian that I couldn't really even order a cappuccino without problems. So, yeah. Yeah, I was actually going to say, you know what, after the show, can you tell me what quantifiable and non-quantifiable actually really is? I'm glad we got that one out of the way. That's interesting. Well, that's a nice start to do the podcast, you know? Yeah. We're getting to know you pretty well. Yeah.

4:59So tell us how now you come back to the United States or how do you want to go from here? Well, I mean, I came back to the United States. Like I said, I moved around a little bit before finally settling here right before the pandemic. And I have given tours here in New York. I've given tours in Philly, obviously Rome. I've done some small private tours in Florence. um so i uh how did you get into touring when i was in rome i was pretty much broke because i couldn't get much work as a would quantifiable as an english teacher i was quantifiably broke and uh i responded to an ad on on one of the job boards and i got a job uh with one of the cultural associations there and so i started giving tours and uh yeah just the rest is history I guess.

5:48Nice. Um, yeah. So, uh, so then you moved to New York city. Yeah. And then what? Uh, well, I worked in the tech industry for a long time, uh, before kind of finding my way back into what I'd say is more of my passion, which is history, storytelling, uh, understanding the, the, the importance of, you know, preserving these symbols of our past and, um, relaying that to a broad audience. So there was a lot of, uh, when I found my way over to save Ellis Island, it was, I don't know, it was like a light bulb going off and finally feeling at home for once. I could tell, but when you, you know, you took me on the tour and it was fascinating and you know, I was felt like I was walking with a friend, which I feel I am now.

6:35And, um, gosh, the information was incredible. So I can't wait for you to talk about it. Yeah. You know, for me going over there, I don't have a personal history involving right Ellis Island you know there were at its peak they said 12 up to 12 million people who passed through there and incredible yeah as a result about 40 percent of the U.S.'s population has some ancestor who passed through there right um I feel like uh you know I'm not quite in the minority but I am one of those people who I didn't have any I didn't have any ancestors go through there um my my father's family he's traced it all the way back to uh 1709 the earliest ancestors that we have from europe uh and there might they might have even come in earlier that's just the earliest record we have uh and they settled mostly in the south in virginia alabama west virginia the appalachians and i'm interested my mom's family's swedish primarily and they all migrated west and settled in utah they're all very mormon and so i think a lot of my ancestry kind of culminates in just a very uh american journey though i don't have a personal connection to ellis island in terms of my family history i think that all of us have some sort of a story or a background that I think Ellis Island is kind of emblematic of.

8:07Right, right. Do you know what year did Ellis Island open? When did this all start? Ellis Island opened as the federal immigration station on January 1st of 1892. Prior to that, the immigration had been left up to the states. It wasn't controlled by the federal government and you know within new york there was uh castle garden had been the primary immigration way station for uh many many years and the government realized that they needed to have federal standards for how immigration was was happening uh to control how they're coming into the country, who's coming into the country, et cetera. So what's interesting to me is to think that word spread around the world to come here to the U.S.

9:03for a better life. I think that's fascinating. And everybody from every corner of the world wanted to come here. So, I mean, immigration had been happening in the United States for, I mean, since before it was the United States. Right. We had the Dutch colonies, obviously New York, was New Amsterdam originally. Exactly. The English colony of Jamestown. The French had come up to, you know, the mostly Canadian region, and the Spanish had settled much of Latin America. So we had immigration happening from an early stage, and the, but, you know, immigration at that time was very slow. like there wasn't a lot of industry here at the time the there wasn't a lot of a draw here this was still kind of considered for a long time a bit of a backwater oh really yeah 1700s obviously things accelerated a little bit but really we start getting the the massive waves and waves of immigrants in the 1800s.

10:13And there's a lot of reasons for that. There is the foundation of us as a country. Right. But I'd say a bigger reason is how much easier the journey became. Right. As we get steamships and we get... Become more modernized, you know. Yeah. Yeah. And what a journey that had taken months before can now be accomplished in a matter of a couple of weeks. Yeah. But immigration wasn't really something that, I don't know if it was on a lot of people's minds until the 1840s and 1850s. Yeah. So through the 1800s, we start to see massive waves of immigrants coming. I think most famously the Irish coming during the Irish potato famine.

11:01Right. But we were getting immigrants from Germany, England, all over, really. A lot of Scandinavian immigrants, as I mentioned, some of my family was. I think mine is, too. I got to talk to my parents and ask them what my heritage is, what my history is, because I think my parents have talked about it. I should know more about it. But go ahead. And that's when we start to get like this real strong nativist movement of people who really want to insulate America from these waves of immigrants. At the same time, like there's a lot of opportunists who are taking advantage of these, you know, people coming in waves off these ships.

11:45Really? Yeah. They're robbing them. Jeez. Um, yeah, there was a, there was no real standardized process for them coming here. They were just getting off the ship. And so it was, there was a lot of need to start building regulations around, uh, how immigrants came here. So 1882 was the passage of the Immigration Act, uh, the first federal immigration law, which started charging a head tax on non-citizen arrivals. And it started excluding certain classes like criminals and quote-unquote idiots. There's a lot to be said there. But yeah, it wasn't until 1891, the Immigration Act of 1891, where the federal enforcement mechanisms came and we started to sort of centralize the inspection of immigrants.

12:46And so that's why that leads us to Ellis Island. They needed a place where they could quarantine the immigrants, where they could quarantine not just in a health sense, but to go through the process of inspection and processing. so and do you know how many now so now we're at Ellis Island where they're formerly correct immigrating into the United States um how many was it how many a day or any numbers do you know yeah I obviously I don't I'm curious what how that worked yeah the peak day was uh or the the peak year for immigration was 1907 the peak day they said there was almost 12 ,000 people that came through the island.

13:36Overall, over a million people came through in 1907. And yeah, 1908, I think over a million people. So it was pretty busy. And so what's the process? So the process at the time, so when these ships are coming over from Europe, they are bringing a wide range of people. They're bringing Polish immigrants, Russian Jews, people from the Balkan states, people from Greece, you name it. You know what? I haven't thought of the immigration process to leave Europe or leave wherever in the world they're coming from. There's got to be a whole process too, right? Or anybody can come? Do you know how that works?

14:29I know I'm asking a lot of questions. No, that's fine. I think it's fascinating. We will probably get to that. In 1924, the Johnson-Reade Act is passed, and that is going to basically shift the onus over to the foreign consulates for processing immigrants and issuing visas. and so we do have a little bit of a period where prior to the Johnson Reed Act in 1924 most of the immigrants were getting processed on Ellis Island not all of them there were some happening on Angel Island and outside of San Francisco they were happening in New Orleans there was a few points of entry but Ellis Island was definitely the largest now you asked about what kind of processing was happening on the european side right so the steamships were responsible for anybody who was going to be rejected so what that means is if they brought some passenger over who was going to not who was not going to pass inspection they were responsible for bringing that person back to their original port so there was a financial component to it an incentive to make sure that they were bringing only people they thought could pass inspection.

15:52And this is why only 2 % of the arriving immigrants were ultimately excluded. So these steamships, as they came across, they're bringing, as I said, they're bringing a wide mixture of people from a number of backgrounds. the class structure was divided up so that there were first and second class passengers who didn't have to get processed on ellis island they would be medically inspected on the ship and they would be dropped off in the battery before ferries took the rest of the passengers to ellis island wow the steerage passengers were the huddled masses so to speak who were in the bottom of the ship and really want to paint a picture of what that journey must have been like because you have political refugees you have people who are fleeing for economic reasons who are fleeing famine who are fleeing whatever number of reasons and many of them have maybe a relative over here already who's sponsored their journey right they may not even have any money they a lot of these people arriving had nothing but the clothes on their back they were spending weeks sometimes getting even to the port they're inspected at their port of departure they are crammed into these uh the steerage section of the ship there's yeah there's very minimal uh uh, you know, venting in there, air circulation, no sunshine.

17:32There's, you know, hundreds of people crammed into these spaces. The stink must've been horrible. You know, I don't, you know, I'm not, this isn't really a good reference, but a lot of people learned about this visual that you're painting a picture of from the movie Titanic, you know, because we saw the different classes of people, different levels and where they stayed, you know? So yeah, that's exactly what you're talking about yeah absolutely so these uh people living living down there there's rats it must have stunk of human you know right i've never been in a crowded subway platform thinking imagining that for weeks on end they're given a tin plate a fork and a spoon and they're fed soup and a little bit of bread every day and you know that many of them don't speak English.

18:24I'd say most of them don't speak English. They're bringing their whole families over here. They, uh, a lot of people are getting sick. I was just going to say illness. Yeah. They're getting sick on the ships. Um, they're malnourished by the time they get here because they haven't really had a solid meal and they arrive. And the very first thing that they get is a, um, you know, a quick six second medical inspection as they're, uh, you know, before they're, um, going up to be processed. And it's a very minimal, right? Medical inspection. So it's either you stay here or go in a sense, right? Yeah.

19:04They, they were, uh, well, there's two, two tiers to the inspection. Everybody's getting the six second, the quote unquote six second inspection. I don't know if every inspection lasted exactly six seconds, but they would come and inspect you for a number of illnesses they knew about. Like one of them famously is trachoma. And that is a, that's a disease that affects your eyes. And so the inspectors had these little button hooks. They were called these little hooks that they would take, stick under everyone's eyelid and peel it back to see if there was any evidence of trachoma. in their eyelids.

19:43And they were using the same bucket hook for every single immigrant. Which is probably spreading this. Yeah, it's probably not doing a great job at containing it. And they were checking them for any obvious mental deficiencies. If there was heart conditions, there was inspectors, they were standing at the top of a staircase. In six seconds. Yeah, and they were watching people who were coming up the stairs to see if they had any potential heart conditions. the people that we wanted coming into the country were workers we wanted people to come in and who could support themselves who could fuel this industrial revolution that we were undergoing you know who could go and work in these steel mills who could work in coal coal mines and meat packing industry and the textile mills you know we had we're undergoing a rapid rapid expansion and industrialization at the time.

20:35And this cheap, uneducated labor force was really one of the things that helped fuel that. So they wanted to make sure that anybody coming in wasn't going to be a public charge, quote unquote, which is going to be anybody who requires charity or assistance. They wanted to make sure there wasn't anybody who was mentally unfit or unhealthy. And so they were screening for a lot of these things up front and they were making marks on each individual's coat with chalk to indicate if they thought that they had one of these, any kind of afflictions. So this was the first processing. and so so okay so and i'm thinking this group that's deemed healthy so to speak goes here but then the people who are not deemed healthy go here yeah correct yeah but you know i want to say something real quick too i mean how amazing must it have been because right before i mean you can tell me if i'm wrong here if like the journey but as they're coming into new york harbor or whatever they see the statue of liberty first right so they're passing by the statue of liberty and i mean two seconds away right there is alice island and what a just a must have been an over overwhelmed with emotions to see here they are at this the greatest land in the world you know coming to the united states and they see the beautiful statue of liberty welcoming them in and then they come here and then they get off the boat and then hey you're not healthy what happens That's got to be terrible.

22:17After all those weeks at sea, after all these probably months and maybe even years of, you know, preparing for this journey. Right. After trying to get your family the tickets for passage and going through everything, seeing the Statue of Liberty, that moment of hope, Lady Liberty with radiating her crown with her torch. What, I mean, what a powerful symbol to be welcomed and greeted to America with. And then to be shuttled over to the island and have your child taken away from you because your child may have had measles. And where do they go? What do they do? So a little of the history of the island itself.

23:02Before it had been the immigration station, it was really just a, you know, the harbor was littered with tiny little islands. And this is just one of many. the island had at some point been where they hung pirates and later there had been a battery built on it during the war of 1812 which was never used at some point there was a tavern built on the island oh i didn't know that which was a very inconvenient place for a tavern i was gonna say i was gonna say let's talk about a tavern yeah on your way home from work you know just a rowboat or something yeah yeah but there was a lot of fishermen out there and so that was uh probably the one place they could go to get a quick meal in the 1890s is when when the immigration station first opened but the island was still pretty small at the time it was only about 3.3 acres and as the needs grew the the island grew uh it would eventually be expanded to about 27 and a half acres.

24:05Wow. And so we see like there were three islands originally that were eventually connected. And as it grew, there was a need to build this hospital. The first hospital was built. So there's three buildings, correct? So there's three islands and on the South Islands, island two and island three as we call them where the hospitals are there are 29 buildings total wow yeah um a lot of those were eventually connected by a long hallway along corridor but that's what i saw correct yeah that's what we went on the hard hat tour yeah hard hat tour yeah we'll talk about it yeah go ahead so there was the general hospital uh which is built for anybody who had you know a non-contagious disease um it could have been anything it could have been a broken arm it could have been they had a sore throat you know right uh there were a lot of pregnant women who came over and had their children born on the island they wanted to make sure that any children being born here if they were being born in a a healthy environment um before you know they embarked on their journeys across the country to wherever their their final destination was right and the uh there were 350 babies born on the island uh the do you know their names yeah go ahead uh so the general the general hospital eventually housed 350 beds the south the southernmost island island three uh had the contagious disease ward built and that's where you went if you had measles, if you had typhus, if you had percoma, if you had any of these really dangerous diseases.

25:59And this is where you showed me on the tour, right? It was fascinating. Yeah. The buildings have, you know, they've been abandoned since the 1950s, but Sayville, Ellis Island has been working to restore those buildings. And we do that through two primary fundraising efforts. One is through private donations, independent donations, and the other is through our hard hat tour where we take people through these uh these 29 hospital buildings and well not all 29 of them and i think i mean you were there it's a very powerful place it is to visit i mean just knowing these immigrant stories knowing what kind of journeys people went through to get here to be standing where they were standing and envision yourself in their shoes and what they went through Yeah.

26:49Powerful. Like we went down to the, uh, uh, the hospice ward on, at the very end of the, uh, the complex. And the morgue, is that what the morgue area too? Is that close? Uh, the, the morgue is on the opposite end, but, uh, the hospice end has the, the, the best view of the statue of Liberty. And that's what I think about a lot is people who are dying of tuberculosis. Right. they don't speak the language. Their nurses don't speak their language. Oh man. Their bedside companions, the other people who were in there probably don't speak their language. And it must have been a really scary, you know, a scary journey for them.

27:34Scary for any of them. There's a lot of children who wound up in, like, you know, the measles wards. By themselves, correct? By themselves. Like no family members. Pulled away from their families. So from what I understood when we were talking, So if they're approved, if they pass the inspection, I should say, then they're on their own. They go to the mainland, so to speak, right? To Manhattan or wherever. But if you're not healthy, not deemed healthy, you stay on Ellis Island. So you're separated from your family, children, like you said earlier, and their parents. Gosh, it had to just be horrific.

28:09Yeah, there was records of people who were there for over a year. I was just going to ask you how long people stayed there. Yeah, I mean, it could be anywhere from a few days to over a year that people were on the island. But it's terrible to think that, or sad to think that families had to leave a family member behind, be it a mother, father, child, and one of them passed away. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, it feels like it's ancient history. because it's not ancient history. There are people alive today whose parents were in the hospital. And we have audio recordings of children who stayed there as adults telling the stories of their life there.

29:02And how confusing it was to be pulled away from their mother and their father and their siblings, put into a room where they didn't know anybody. They didn't know what was going on. A lot of them are from rural communities. They've not seen medical devices the way that these are. There's stories of people being terrified of the x-ray machine and not knowing what an x-ray was, which makes sense. Right. Yeah. And so it was really scary, but the, a lot of these stories talk about the, the relationships that they were able to build with the nurses and the doctors there. And so the, the story is, the stories of the nurses is, I think one of the most important pieces of this.

29:49And we do forget about that. There was a lot of nurses who lived on the island. You know, they lived there six days a week. a lot of the babies that were born there were named after the nurses or the doctors who cared for them there's stories of the nurses after leaving the island you know becoming very close friends with the the patients who they'd had in their wards under their care and remaining lifelong friends with them and so i think it shows a lot of of um humanity and yeah i think that there there's if I could write some kind of HBO drama, it would be like a show about, you know, the lives of the doctors and nurses and the patients.

30:35That'd be an amazing show too. Yeah. Truly, you know, it's the history of immigrants, the history of what they went through here at Ellis Island and what they saw. And gosh. Yeah. Everybody loves a hospital show. Right. You know, and I, you know, I think the hard hat tour was, is really important for people to see because you do learn about the history and the journey of our, of those people, you know, who made that difficult decision and that difficult journey here. And that's because now we're here today because of them, this beautiful city that's built upon immigrants. Absolutely. You know?

31:13Yeah. And I'm in a beautiful country. That's what I meant too. I'm sorry I said that. No, no. I mean, it is a beautiful city. And it is built on immigrants. I didn't mean that. I meant to say country, but, you know, we're in New York. so it's about New York so I always it's in New York City and the United States it is called the New Yorker's Podcast yes exactly yeah you know I didn't know this so you pull up on the ferry so first of all you take the what's the name of it the statue what's the name of the ferry oh the statue city cruises ferry yeah statue city cruises from you know right there by the right by there by the Staten Island Ferry that's how close it is and you just zip over yeah right there in the battery by Castle Garden yeah super easy to get here.

31:55Yeah. And, or get there, I should say. But, um, so when I got there and when I met you, so what is it? The three different sections? Is that correct? Mm-hmm. Go ahead again. Cause I, can you refresh my memory on that? Uh, the three islands? Yeah. Yeah. So there, there were three islands. The first island, uh, where the majority of the immigrants were processed, uh, is where the immigration museum is today. Exactly. Yeah. And then there's the connecting island one with island two. is where the ferry house was and that was where most people were departing after getting approved and getting everything uh all their paperwork settled and and then they would head off to the train depots in Hoboken or they would go into Manhattan or you know there was a lot of directions and pathways people were going from there then if they had if they had failed the medical inspection they would keep going down that hallway into island two where there's the general hospital and they were getting a more detailed inspection as they were deemed mentally deficient as i said there was a mental hospital on the island or it was just a generic we need to treat you for you know a common cold or we want to keep you for a few days because you have you know we're not sure what's wrong with you uh or if we can identify this person has tuberculosis we need to what's interesting too is we talked about what was deemed as a mental illness back then is not today yeah you know which is sad to think about you know is something that is you know not truly not a mental illness and back then they didn't know certain things and it's sad to think about but go ahead and you know there would be later on like certain classist ways of screening the immigrants literacy tests and trying to check if they could solve certain types of puzzles there's a really fun story a little anecdote about uh this girl who was asked the best way to sweep the stairs i think it's i think it was a question it's like wow should you be sweeping the stairs like this or like this and her response was i didn't come to america to sweep stairs like you passed yeah yeah yeah that's funny yeah so they you know they They were trying to screen immigrants according to certain criteria, health, wealth, ability, and some intellectual standards at some point.

34:31So, yeah, a lot of ways. But, again, it's important to emphasize that of the 12 million people, it was only roughly 2 % of them that were sent back to their home countries. What about the story about the girl with the boat? Can you talk about the girl, the boat with the girl's name? Anymore. Yeah, I could talk about any more. Yeah, when the island first opened on January 1st of 1892, the first ferry to come in, the first ship to come in with immigrants, it was a very important moment, I think, for this new immigration idea, this whole federal immigration processing center. And so they wanted to make sure that they had a good front page image for, you know, the type of people they were allowing in.

35:22And so there is a story of a 17 year old girl. Maybe she was 15 years old. You might've even been 13 years old. The, some of the records are conflicting on this, but anymore, this pretty bright Irish girl coming down the gangway and some, I believe he was Austrian guy trying to shove his way forward and basically being held back by the officials so that they could get this moment where Annie Moore comes off the gangplank and, you know, welcome to America and get this picture and again, make her the face of the new wave of immigration. Wow. Yeah. That's fascinating. And so then they named a boat after her and it's at Ellis Island.

36:07Yeah. You pointed that out to me. I thought that was really interesting information. Yeah. One of the, I don't know what the boat is used for actually. um so i don't know what to call it like a coast it's not not coast guard boat but right um oh it doesn't yeah there's a boat there there's a boat there so do you do you have any other stories that you feel are that resonate with you or that you think are you know really interesting to you so yeah one end of the hospital complex we have the morgue and the autopsy theater uh really interesting space really i mean you and i went in there and you just kind of feel the solemnity of it and right you know knowing what was going on there but if you imagine we have you know a million immigrants a year in some years coming through there from 75 different countries bringing all manner of diseases and bringing all manner of illnesses and this hospital became one of the most state-of-the-art advanced hospitals in the country at the time.