August 15, 2011
This morning my Google Alert "Ellis Island" alerted me to a "press release" about a new way to see Ellis Island, using something that you may run concurrent to your visit on your iPhone. I think. I don’t have an iPhone and avoid a lot of the annoying "smart" devices that prove such a distraction to seeing the world around me. This one struck a nerve because I love Ellis Island, I worked there many years ago and can’t stand to imagine the oxymoron of people walking around plugged into their phones looking at this virtual app while in situ in the real place. They won’t actually experience anything OTHER than their phones. What a wasted trip.
People need to get over these "smart devices," they’re dumbing down the world. There are a lot of good things you can do with your phones, like call people, research prices in the grocery store, send an occasional photo to your twitter account, but the rest of the time put them away and experience the world as it is. Just because someone can make a device or an application doesn’t mean it is any good or that you need to try it. This press release was the document that finally pushed my buttons hard enough to inspire this rant, and justification for dissing the app.
Ellis Island served as a major east coast immigration station from 1892 until 1924 when the second of two restrictive immigration laws turned the flow to a trickle of migrants leaving Europe and other Atlantic nations coming to the U.S. For many years other agencies used the island for office space and detention, and in 1954 the island was closed down completely. In 1976 the National Park Service opened the island for tours; as a poor step-child to the charismatic Statue of Liberty the season was only six months long and consisted of guided tours through plywood-reinforced (think the sidewalk passageway under scaffolding) corridors in the crumbling structures. There was no heat or air conditioning, getting to the island at extremely high or low tide was a challenge, and the visitor numbers were a fraction of Liberty Island’s.
In the 1980s Ellis Island was restored when corporate dollars turned portions of the island back into its original hermetic clean lined self, complete with air conditioning, self-guided tours, exhibits, food service and a gift shop and bookstore. Rooms exhibits are set up with preserved artifacts, photo reproductions, and the best acrylic exhibit sign boards Harper’s Ferry (the heart of NPS historic interpretation development) can generate.
I worked at Ellis Island as a National Park Ranger in the late 1970s, when the echo of ceiling plaster was heard falling on humid days, wet floors were slipping hazards, and where you could see your breath in cold weather and you dripped sweat during the humid summers in New York Harbor. And this was inside the buildings. You really felt like you’d been somewhere when you exited the crumbling compound of buildings.
Rangers led every tour back then and interacted directly with the visiting public because there were no exhibits, only rangers telling the history and stories of immigrants. Visitors stayed in tours groups and the entire experience was a an exercise in imagining what the decaying buildings must have looked like in their heyday: large, clean, but very crowded – it was a discussion of the history of the island and always included the collected stories we heard from visitors and their families who came out to the island to see where it all started. I loved the storytelling aspect of the visit, of seeing tears and smiles as story outcomes were happy or sad. This is a place where the visitors were a crucial part of the storytelling process and we collected all that we could. Our extemporaneous tours were based upon a great deal of history and were adapted to the knowledge and interest of the groups before us. One size did not fit all in the early days, we crafted our tours to fit each group.
I suspect the immigrant experience lay somewhere between these two post-immigrant modern day extremes. The buildings were new, the rooms were large and clean, and during the height of migration, very crowded and probably smelly and noisy. I don’t know if Ellis Island had air conditioning; based upon the number of fans I saw around the facility I’d guess "no." So today’s visitor, wanting a little of the feel, should bustle through the rooms with a crowd of non-English speakers and they should turn off the AC.
Give Me a Break! Take a real tour!
If you’re going through the restored Ellis Island immigration site in New York Harbor with your iPhone and headphones playing, following a new British "tour" that intends to show you "the darker side of Ellis Island" you’re wasting your $1.99 and might as well not go to the island at all if you’re planning to tour it that way. The "real" Ellis isn’t encapsulated in a media bubble. If you’re visiting any National Park, experience it with all of your senses, don’t stare at the bright little screen in your hand, blocking out the sounds of the place with your earbuds.
The press release claims "It is illustrated with thought provoking and evocative contemporary archival photographs." Oh. You mean the same public domain photos that the National Park Service has already installed all over the place in the static exhibits? If she paid for any of the photos she used, the price would be higher than $1.99 so she must have used the same photos everyone uses. That’s novel.
If you want a tour, you will have to get lucky and see if the Ellis Rangers are offering them now – or you can hire a private guide. The only private tour guide I know who has been taking tours to Ellis for years is Tom Bernardin, who worked with me at Ellis starting in 1978. While the Rama app developer Hannah Murray "visited New York nine years ago," Bernardin has been working on and visiting the island for the last 33 years and has continued his research through those years.
Pardon me me for dismissing this app I haven’t used out of hand but it sounds like the worst possible approach to visiting a great site like Ellis Island. I will note here that good private tours are not inexpensive. You get what you pay for – depending on the extent of the tour or if you want to visit other parts of the city through the day, it can easily run to several hundred dollars, but if you hire Tom you have him to yourself and he knows NYC inside and out.
So, go visit the island with your eyes and ears open, wander around and look and think; after you pay for the boat ticket the island is free. Or go with someone, whether ranger or private tour guide, who can transport you through time and answer questions about your particular interest areas, or knows how to find the answers for you. Put the phone, if you simply can’t turn it off, on vibrate only, in your pocket. And leave it there for an uninterrupted trip through time.
This blog rant is not an endorsement for the iPhone app, but it may be considered an endorsement for my friend Tom Bernardin’s tours. I have not been paid to write this. With this post I’m now sending my rants to facebook and twitter, along with my more mellow gardening, dog, and nature observations in my “Woman of Many Parts” blog. (Ellis Island Tom from Aliza Moorji on Vimeo.)
