Quite by chance the New York Yankees, who have won the baseball World Series in the last few days, were given a tickertape parade which started from Battery Park yesterday. And that happens to be where the ferry to the Statue of Liberty starts from, our destination for the day. Our first reaction was how to avoid it, the crowd, and the traffic. But we wound up in the crowd anyway.
What a treat it turned out to be! Happy friendly people celebrating. Floats, and lots and lots of air-born paper. These days it's from the shredders every office has. Some of the bits we saw floating by looked pretty much intact. But it was great fun. We stayed in the crowd for nearly an hour before moving on.
Bon got some great pics of the Statue, and of Manhattan Island from Liberty Island. I haven't included here the ones she is most proud of, as they need more space than is available, but they will be on Picasaweb soon. We spent quite a while on Liberty Island. It was cold, but bright sunshine and a good place to be. None the less, I think if we had realised what was in store for us at Ellis Island where the immigrants were processed until 1954, we'd have left sooner to allow more time.
It must have been moving for Bon – here was where her grandfather came to America from Czechoslovakia in 1904. She did make an attempt to trace the record at the computer terminal at the ground floor exhibition, but there was a line of people waiting and when the first attempt did not succeed she gave up. I think we can do it on-line from home, I'll certainly try. There were numerous exhibits but the first one to grab me was the set of instructions about how to find your ancestor in the records.
It was fine until I came to the section beginning “If your ancestor was an enslaved person...” at which point the full human horror of slavery hit home. I was moved almost to tears thinking both of the slaves themselves and of their descendants trying to trace people who did not appear in the immigration record because they didn't count as people. Your best hope was to have an idea of the ship they came on, when you might be able to find a record of their first being sold. Even now, in the early hours of the following day, I find it hard to write about. History got a human face here for me.
Then we went upstairs to the Registration Hall – a large room where, on most days, around 5,000 immigrant hopefuls were processed. Luckily we tacked on to a talk by one of the National Park Rangers about what had happened. The best bit was that 98% got in. But up to 1,000 a month were sent back to where they had come from either because they were judged mentally incompetent, or liable to become a charge on the public purse, or because they had a contagious disease. The process was, to say the least, impersonal.
Then we moved on to an exhibition about what happened to these people – how sick children were treated (in short, hospitalised and allowed a 5 minute visit from their parents once a week). The whole family was detained until the child either recovered or died. Once again it was moving to the point of being draining for me, and it must have been much more so for Bonnie whose grandfather had been through it.
We had to miss some parts of the exhibition, because we needed to get back to our hotel and change of the concert we had tickets for. But I am not sure how much more I could have handled anyway.
Imagine these thousands, most without work, many without English, suddenly confronted with an implacable bureaucracy, and all they wanted was to leave home behind and assimilate – become Americans. There was a long list of organisations that provided volunteers to help these people. Some were secular, organised immigrant groups, Ukrainians for example, who at least could provided someone who spoke a new arrival's language and often a lot more. But the vast majority were religious organisations, Quakers, Orthodox, Salvation Army (of course); too many to remember, and I could not but think how grateful the newcomers must have been for a friendly and helpful face, and I was grateful for them too. I've not usually got a great deal of good to say about religion, but credit where credit is due, and here it is very due indeed.
So we went back to the hotel, changed, and took ourselves to Lincoln Center. It's a stunning group of buildings. Bonnie doesn't take her camera to concerts, so she did the best possible with her phone. I don't have the kit here to download the pictures, so they will follow. We heard Schubert, music written in the year between Beethoven's death and Schubert's own, aged only 31. The C Minor Piano Sonata was thrilling, and the F Minor Piano Duet Fantasia that followed was very good indeed, but then came the String Quintet in C Major which was absolutely wonderful and took me at least to the heights.
Dinner in a diner, a local business that had fed the residents of the Upper West Side since the 1960s finished the day. It was a tiring one, a long one, and an enlightening one. If I come back to NYC one of the main objectives will be to go to Ellis Island, complete the exhibition, and if possible find Joe Zahorec's registration. After all, I owe him something too.
What a treat it turned out to be! Happy friendly people celebrating. Floats, and lots and lots of air-born paper. These days it's from the shredders every office has. Some of the bits we saw floating by looked pretty much intact. But it was great fun. We stayed in the crowd for nearly an hour before moving on.
It must have been moving for Bon – here was where her grandfather came to America from Czechoslovakia in 1904. She did make an attempt to trace the record at the computer terminal at the ground floor exhibition, but there was a line of people waiting and when the first attempt did not succeed she gave up. I think we can do it on-line from home, I'll certainly try. There were numerous exhibits but the first one to grab me was the set of instructions about how to find your ancestor in the records.
It was fine until I came to the section beginning “If your ancestor was an enslaved person...” at which point the full human horror of slavery hit home. I was moved almost to tears thinking both of the slaves themselves and of their descendants trying to trace people who did not appear in the immigration record because they didn't count as people. Your best hope was to have an idea of the ship they came on, when you might be able to find a record of their first being sold. Even now, in the early hours of the following day, I find it hard to write about. History got a human face here for me.
Then we moved on to an exhibition about what happened to these people – how sick children were treated (in short, hospitalised and allowed a 5 minute visit from their parents once a week). The whole family was detained until the child either recovered or died. Once again it was moving to the point of being draining for me, and it must have been much more so for Bonnie whose grandfather had been through it.
We had to miss some parts of the exhibition, because we needed to get back to our hotel and change of the concert we had tickets for. But I am not sure how much more I could have handled anyway.
Imagine these thousands, most without work, many without English, suddenly confronted with an implacable bureaucracy, and all they wanted was to leave home behind and assimilate – become Americans. There was a long list of organisations that provided volunteers to help these people. Some were secular, organised immigrant groups, Ukrainians for example, who at least could provided someone who spoke a new arrival's language and often a lot more. But the vast majority were religious organisations, Quakers, Orthodox, Salvation Army (of course); too many to remember, and I could not but think how grateful the newcomers must have been for a friendly and helpful face, and I was grateful for them too. I've not usually got a great deal of good to say about religion, but credit where credit is due, and here it is very due indeed.
So we went back to the hotel, changed, and took ourselves to Lincoln Center. It's a stunning group of buildings. Bonnie doesn't take her camera to concerts, so she did the best possible with her phone. I don't have the kit here to download the pictures, so they will follow. We heard Schubert, music written in the year between Beethoven's death and Schubert's own, aged only 31. The C Minor Piano Sonata was thrilling, and the F Minor Piano Duet Fantasia that followed was very good indeed, but then came the String Quintet in C Major which was absolutely wonderful and took me at least to the heights.
Dinner in a diner, a local business that had fed the residents of the Upper West Side since the 1960s finished the day. It was a tiring one, a long one, and an enlightening one. If I come back to NYC one of the main objectives will be to go to Ellis Island, complete the exhibition, and if possible find Joe Zahorec's registration. After all, I owe him something too.
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