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If you passed the
medical inspection, then came the last part, the immigration
inspector's questioning.
Your family and you would have been
called forward to this desk and asked a series of questions about
where you were from, where you were going, did you have a job, and
did you have $25.00 for each person in your party. The $25.00
number was an arbitrary number arrived at by the Federal government
since it equaled an immigration inspector's weekly paycheck.
If you passed the inspection, you would have gone down the stairs
over the inspector's left shoulder.
If you failed the
inspection and needed to be detained for further examination, you
would have gone to the rooms to the rear over the inspector's right
shoulder.
If your case could not
be resolved immediately, you would have gone upstairs to a sleeping
room, with this view of the Statue of Liberty appearing as you
turned on the staircase landing.
When your case was resolved or you
passed the immigration inspector's questioning, you would have been
told to go down the left, center or right channel of these stairs
and through the doors.
The doors were called "The Doors
of Separation" and for a very good reason. When you passed
through the doors, there were three ways to go:
-
Left Channel of Stairs
Through Left Door -- Go to doors on left and purchase railroad
tickets to New Jersey and western cities.
-
Center Channel of
Stairs Through Center Door -- go straight to end of the hall for
exclusion and return to your country of origin.
-
Right Channel of Stairs
Through Right Door -- Go to doors on right and purchase railroad
tickets for travel into New York City's subway system or to cities
north and east of NYC. My relatives went through the right
channel to buy their tickets to New England.
If headed to New York, you
then boarded a ferry with this view as you left Ellis Island.
For my relatives, there probably
wasn't a better sight than this, Battery Park and Castle Clinton
where they came ashore in Manhattan and moved on to the trains to
New England.
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