Ellis Island National Immigration Museum

Ellis Island, situated in Upper New York Bay between Manhattan and Jersey City, operated as the United States' primary immigration processing station from 1892 to 1954, receiving over 12 million immigrants during its 62 years of operation. The Main Building, a four-story Romanesque Revival structure completed in 1900 after a fire destroyed the original wooden station, was restored to its 1918 appearance by the National Park Service and reopened as a museum in 1990. The building's Great Hall — formally the Registry Room — is the museum's architectural and emotional centerpiece: a high-vaulted Guastavino tile ceiling spans 56 feet above a registry floor where immigrants were examined by doctors and inspectors, their fates determined in minutes after weeks at sea. The museum's permanent exhibitions on the second floor trace the full history of immigration to the United States through photographs, oral histories, artifacts, and documentary footage. The Peopling of America gallery addresses immigration from the earliest colonial arrivals through the late 20th century. Personal stories thread through the exhibitions — the experience of a Polish family separated for inspection, the documents carried by a Syrian merchant, the photograph of a Greek girl in her best dress for the Atlantic crossing — making the statistics of mass migration human in scale. The American Immigrant Wall of Honor on the island's exterior lists 700,000 names of immigrants whose families paid for their inclusion; it is the largest wall of names in the world. Ellis Island is reached by the same Statue of Liberty ferry from Battery Park, and most visitors combine both islands in a single half-day excursion.