As the US marks one year since Superstorm Sandy which hit the East Coast killing 117 people, storm damaged Ellis Island in New York reopened.
Some of the buildings bear plywood scars from the storm, and a million artefacts are still in storage in Maryland.
But on the eve of the anniversary, Ellis Island, the American gateway for millions of immigrants, reopened to the public yesterday, one of the last major parks or monuments damaged by the storm to do so.
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“It feels wonderful to be able to welcome visitors again,” said David Luchsinger, superintendent of the Statue of Liberty National Monument, which includes Ellis Island. “It’s overwhelming.”
Mr Luchsinger said he was determined to reopen the Ellis Island Immigration Museum before the anniversary of the hurricane, even though the site has not fully recovered. He chose yesterday, in part, because it was the 127th birthday of the Statue of Liberty.
By midday, hundreds of visitors, many of them international tourists, had disembarked from ferries to gaze at the Great Hall on the second floor of the main immigration building.
The island was where 12 million immigrants arrived for processing between 1892 and 1954, when the federal venture closed for good. (It reopened as a historic site in 1990.)
Stephane Leroy of Paris was there with his son Simeon (12). Mr Leroy (41) had visited Ellis Island 20 years ago and wanted to share it with his wife and son, but worried that it might not reopen in time for their holiday to New York City. “We are flying back to France tomorrow morning, so we just made it,” Mr Leroy said.
The brick-and-limestone French Renaissance Revival building that serves as the centrepiece of Ellis Island was spared major structural damage during the hurricane. But the storm surge sent 8 feet of water pouring into the basement, destroying the site’s electrical, computing, phone, heat, water and sewage systems.
Concerned about humidity levels and temperatures, officials moved two-thirds of the museum’s collection into storage. Permanent fixes are still being worked on. The goal, Mr Luchsinger said, is to make all future systems resilient “in case, God forbid, another Sandy comes rolling through.”
By May, a new electrical system should be placed out of harm’s way on the second floor of the incinerator building, while a new heating and air-conditioning system able to withstand flooding will be installed in the basement.
Until that new heating system is in place, Ellis Island is using the building’s radiators, which had sat silent and cold for years. Temporarily reviving the steam heat allowed the National Park Service, which runs the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, to reopen the site. Liberty Island reopened on July 4th.
Mr Luchsinger could have opened Ellis Island this summer, except for the absence of air conditioning. During the next few months, he said, the million artefacts will be brought back from Maryland and placed in dozens of galleries, still closed, on either side of the Great Hall.
Yesterday, one gallery labelled “Peak Immigration Years” displayed a sign that read: “Area Closed. Do Not Enter.”
Right before Hurricane Sandy hit, Ellis Island had opened a new permanent exhibition, called ‘Journeys: The Peopling of America 1550-1890’. That exhibit is now back, and another instalment, capturing the post-Ellis Island immigrant experience, will open next fall.
Jean Hart, of Newport Beach, California, was there for opening day with her son Andrew, a former New Yorker also from California. Ms Hart’s paternal grandparents, who were from Eastern Europe, had come through Ellis Island upon arriving in New York, and she was hoping to find some record of their brief visit. “I had no idea what Ellis Island looked like,” she said, taking in the 28,000 tiles that make up the vaulted ceiling. “It’s really something.”
New York Times