Emigrants Landing at Ellis Island (1903)

Passengers disembarking onto Ellis Island. Filmed by Alfred Camille Abadie.

Ellis Island on film: Time, place, and vibe

95 degrees Fahrenheit.

That was the high on July 9, 1903, the hottest day that New York City would record that year.

Imagine boarding the steam ferry William Myers on that day after seemingly endless weeks at sea on a transatlantic ship. It’s hot. It’s sweaty. You’re carrying all your belongings on your back; maybe you have children with you. It’s been a long journey, but you’re almost there—you can see it through the dense throng of your fellow passengers: Ellis Island.

A second still from the film. Can you imagine wearing a three-piece suit in 95-degree weather?

You’ve been dreaming of this for weeks, for months, for years, maybe your whole life. And now, it’s finally here. And as you disembark from the William Myers and proceed to the processing center, perhaps you notice on your left a man in his mid-twenties manning a camera. His name is Alfred Camille Abadie, a filmmaker who works for Thomas Edison. He has been tasked with recording the ferry docking and the passengers stepping off the boat and onto American soil. Abadie’s finished silent film isn’t long—under three minutes—but in 2019 it would be preserved by the Library of Congress in the National Film Registry for its historical significance.

Why is Ellis Island important?

Ellis Island from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.

To answer this question, we need to look at a little history.

In use for many years by the American military to house Fort Gibson, on  January 1, 1892, Ellis Island opened for a new kind of business: processing immigrants arriving at the Port of New York and New Jersey. In June 1897 a devastating fire destroyed Ellis Island’s wooden infrastructure. It took until 1900 for new buildings to be finished, at which point immigrant processing on Ellis Island resumed. In total, Ellis Island processed around twelve million immigrants during its active lifespan. So why were there so many immigrants coming through Ellis Island?

Immigrants waiting for inspection on Ellis Island.

In the mid to late nineteenth century, European countries saw unprecedented levels of religious discrimination and economic and political volatility. This led to what is considered the biggest human migration in history, and most of those coming to America came through Ellis Island. My own ancestors came through the island’s processing center in 1923, my great-great-grandmother seeking a better life and education for her four children.

A ship manifest entry for my great-great-grandmother from the Ellis Island website.

Immigrants continued to be processed at Ellis Island through 1924, at which point the only people being brought to the island were refugees, the sick, and people with paperwork issues. After 1924, the island was repurposed as a Coast Guard training base and, during World War II, an internment center for suspected Japanese, German, and Italian spies. Ellis Island was officially closed in 1954.

Why is Emigrants Landing at Ellis Island significant?

Immigrant passengers disembarking onto Ellis Island.

This film, despite its brevity, captures a specific and often romanticized time in American history. The idea of “the American dream” is often associated with this context: an immigrant from a far-off land, full of hopes and dreams, comes to America to seek a better life. Films like Charlie Chaplin’s The Immigrant (1917) and James Cameron’s Titanic (1997) present fictionalized accounts of people from this moment in time, and it is a period that is still linked in the American imagination to dreams of prosperity and freedom.

Modern-day Ellis Island.

I feel that this film is more significant than ever in America’s current political climate. In a time when immigrants of all stripes are being vilified, demonized, and mistreated, I think it important to remember that we are all people. We can’t gloss over some of the realities of the time this film shows. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had their anti-immigration propaganda, exclusionary laws, and quota policies, and when I look around at what’s happening in my country now, I feel like we haven’t moved on from that bigotry. I see groups of masked men taking people off the street, often for no real reason, so confident that what they are doing is right that they won’t even show their faces. I see dehumanizing anti-immigrant propaganda coming directly from the White House. I see non-Indigenous Americans, all of whom have immigrant ancestors, forgetting that America no more “belongs” to them than it “belongs” to the smushed raisin I found on my kitchen floor this morning.

Dramatization of the raisin I found. Photo enlarged to show texture.

I can feel myself getting rant-y, so I’ll leave it there for now. But I encourage you to take a few minutes to watch this film, which is available on the Library of Congress website. Take two minutes out of your day to remember that we all come from immigrants, we are all human, and we are all deserving of dignity.   

Camille