they were called the Darmstadt, the Fürst Bismarck,
the Staatendam, the Kaiser Wilhelm, the Königin Luise,
the Westernland, the Pennland,
the Bohemia, the Polynesia, the Prinzess Irene, the Princeton,
the Umbria, the Lusitania, the Adriatic,
the Coronia, the Mauretania, the San Giovanni,
the Giuseppe Verdi, the Patricia, the Duca degli Abruzzi,
the New Amsterdam, the Martha Washington,
the Thuringia, the Titanic,
the Lidia, the Susquehanna, the Albert Balin,
the Hansington, the Columbus, the Reliance, the Blücher

but at the conclusion of their exhausting
journey, most of those who saw Manhattan
emerging from the mist knew that their ordeal
was not quite over

they still had to pass through Ellis Island,
the island that
in every European tongue
had been renamed the isle of tears

tränen insel

wispa łez

île des larmes

isola delle lagrime

το νησί των δαχρύων

остров слёз

טרערן-איכרזל

its a small island about twenty-seven acres in size
a few hundred yards from the tip of
Manhattan.
the Indians called it Gull Island,
and the Dutch Oyster Island

its first owner was a rich Dutch
merchant named De Pauw
the next a certain Captain Dyre, a customs officer
then someone named Thomas Lloyd
in 1765 a pirate called Anderson was hanged there
and for ten years or so
the place was called Gibbet Island
then the man bought it who was
to give it its final name, Samuel Ellis

he left it to his family,
who sold it to a certain John Berry,
who ceded it to the City of New York,
which finally sold it to the federal government
for ten thousand dollars

during and after the Civil War
it became a munitions depot

then, around 1890,
the Congress
decided to build a new reception center
to replace the buildings at Castle Garden
which were getting too small

the buildings were almost
completed when, on January 1, 1892,
the first immigrant was officially received at Ellis Island.
She was a fifteen-year-old Irish girl from County Cork
named Annie Moore.
As a token of welcome, she was presented with
a ten-dollar gold piece
the equivalent today of about four hundred dollars

almost sixty-three years later,
on November 12, 1954, the Ellis Island, a ferry
that provided a continuous shuttle service
between the island and the city
and that can still be seen today where it lies
half foundered next to the dock,
made its final trip:
it carried a single passenger, a Norwegian sailor, the last
immigrant registered by the Ellis Island office.

in the meantime
nearly sixteen million
men, women, and children
had passed through Ellis Island,
over three quarters of them
between 1892 and 1914

those were the years
when there were as many
as ten thousand arrivals
in one day

designed in the style of the French Renaissance
by the architects Boring and Tilton,
left to rack and ruin since 1954,
the buildings on Ellis Island were declared
part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument
in 1976, the year of the Bicentenary,
and reopened to the public.