Immigration Archives - Page 14 of 14

The Associated Press is reporting that the Ellis Island Immigration Museum is creating The Peopling of America Center to tell the history of those who arrived in America outside the traditional peak immigration dates of 1892 to 1954:

Exhibits will focus on the arrival of Native Americans, who are believed to have migrated to North America more than 10,000 years ago across the Bering Sea from Asia; Europeans who landed on the Eastern seaboard from the 1600s through 1892; Africans brought here forcibly by slave traders; and today’s immigrants from all over the globe…
The $20 million, 20,000-square-foot space, designed by Edwin Schlossberg of ESI Design, will be located in an existing gallery that will be redesigned and in an adjoining building that now houses the curatorial staff…
Work on the new center began in September. Funding has been underwritten in part by Bank of America and the Annenberg Foundation. Briganti said the foundation has attained more than 75 percent of its fundraising goal.
Upon its completion in 2011, the museum will be renamed Ellis Island: The National Museum of Immigration.

From the New York Times comes a report on the newest Tenement Museum in New York City:

The [Joseph and Bridget Moore family] place will become the sixth apartment of former immigrant residents of 97 Orchard Street to be recreated. The apartments are all nearly identical in size at about 325 square feet. One represents the home of a German Jewish family soon after the father disappeared; another a Lithuanian Jewish family whose father had just died. Another is the remade home of Italian Catholics about to be evicted.

The museum was established in 1988 in 97 Orchard, an 1864 brick building, and attracts 130,000 visitors a year. The building is a time capsule of primitive bathrooms and windowless passageways. In 1935, the building’s owners sealed off most of the 20 units rather than make changes to meet new housing codes.
The fourth-floor apartment for the Moores — it is not known exactly where in the building they lived — will be the museum’s earliest simulation and the first to reflect the huge influx of Irish immigrants in the 19th century.
“We take these dynamic, compelling family stories, and use them to draw people into the greater historical context of immigrants in America,” said Stephen H. Long, the vice president of collections and education at the museum. Members of the staff began researching the Moores five years ago.
The Moores’ experience, Mr. Long added, also made for teachable moments about the history of medicine and public health. “When the Moores lived here,” he said, “the mortality rate for Irish immigrant children was 25 percent.”
Only four of the Moores’ eight children, all girls, reached adulthood. Mrs. Moore died in 1882, when she was 36, shortly after giving birth to her eighth daughter. Curators speculate that the malnutrition that killed Agnes was brought on by drinking swill: milk from diseased cows, which street vendors ladled out of dirty vats and sometimes adulterated with chalk or ammonia.

A Virtual tour of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum is available on the web.

Immigration

Ellis Island to Include Native Americans, African Slaves

New Tenement Museum Reflects Irish Immigration