I toured Ellis Island's eerie abandoned hospital - take a look inside
The people who were successfully treated eventually arrived in New York City to (hopefully) live out their American dreams.
The rooms with the better views were often reserved for the immigrants who would return to their countries or die on Ellis Island.
The tuberculosis wards featured two sinks, one designated just for spitting. These patients were likely awaiting deportation, making the view of the Statue of Liberty in their mirrors particularly cruel.
We visited the morgue, which featured these slots for cadavers ready for autopsies and a lecture hall for medical students (who "saw every disease on the planet," McInness said). Over the hospital's two-decade operation, 3,500 patients reportedly died.
For especially contagious diseases like yellow fever, the staff quarantined patients and locked the ward’s doors for up to 21 days.
A few other practices were more barbaric, like pouring chloric acid on scalps to treat ringworm and peeling back eyelids with button hooks to check for trachoma.
One such nurse was Florence Nightingale, who understood that a patient's mental health could be critical to recovery. She advocated for large windows between rooms that allowed patients to see the nurses and thus feel they were being cared for.
A talented group of doctors, surgeons, and nurses staffed the hospital, McInnes said. They performed innovative procedures for the time, like using x-rays to help kill infections, and delivered about 350 babies.
We passed by a few "psychopathic" wards, which McInnes summed up as "recreational cages." The immigrants who didn’t pass the required intelligence tests were moved to these rooms until their eventual deportations.
Many aspects of life in the complex felt foreign to the newcomers, McInnes said. One person, who had never eaten spaghetti before, called it “worms covered in blood." The kitchen pictured below served meals to 450 patients a day.
This is the laundry room. There were no antibiotics at the time, so the industrial washers were necessary to kill bacteria on patient gowns.
If immigrants were determined to be underweight, have arthritis, or have a bad back by the hospital’s standards (which was run by the Department of Commerce and Labor), they could be deported.
The majority of the hospital's patients were poor and came to do physically demanding jobs.
After the immigrants disembarked, doctors took just six seconds to determine if they were healthy enough to enter (and work in) the US. Some were deported, and the rest were sent to wards like the one below.
French street artist JR installed 26 life-size portraits like these on windows and walls throughout the hospital in 2014.
There were approximately 450 beds throughout the hospital, with 14 in each room.
The hospital is a maze of hallways and wards where patients were organized by disease, including measles, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, mumps, and whooping cough.
When we arrived, we met our tour guide, John McInnes, and put on hard hats.
"This is your last chance to turn back," he said.
The hospital, a massive complex consisting of 11 pavilions, opened in 1901. It welcomed immigrants from all over.
To reach Ellis Island, we took a ferry from the southernmost tip of New York City.
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