Download Ellis Island: The History and Legacy of America's Most Famous Immigration Gateway AudioBook Free
"So, anyhow, we'd to get off of the dispatch and we were put on a sensitive, which took us across to Ellis Island. So when I noticed Ellis Island - it's a great, big place - I pondered that which you were going to do within. And most of us had to get out of the sensitive, and then into this, and collect your bags within, and the area was crowded with people, and chatting, and crying - people were crying. And we approved, go through some of the halls there, and tried to keep in mind that the halls, big halls, big available spots there, and there is bars, and there is people behind these bars, and they were chatting different languages, and I was worried to death. I thought I had been in jail." (Mary Mullins, an Irish immigrant) By the middle of the 19th century, NY City's society surpassed the unfathomable quantity of 1 million people, despite its obvious insufficient space. This is mostly due to the fact that so many immigrants going to America naturally got in NY Harbor, prior to the government set up the official immigration system on Ellis Island. At first, the city itself set up its immigration registration center in Castle Garden near to the site of the initial Fort Amsterdam, and by natural means many of these immigrants, who have been arriving with little more than the clothes on their back, didn't travel considerably and thus continued to be in NY. Of course, the addition of so many immigrants and more with less money put strains on the quality of life. Between 1862 and 1872, the number of tenements had risen from 12,000 to 20,000 and the number of tenement residents grew from 380,000 to 600,000. One notorious tenement on the East River, Gotham Courtroom, housed 700 people on a 20-by-200-feet lot.
