Save Ellis Island Hard Hat Tours
-Tickets may be purchased on Ellis Island, or may be purchased ahead of time in a bundle with your ferry pass at Statue Cruises
-Tours are 90 minutes long and run every day from 11:30am-1:00pm, 12:00pm-1:30pm, 12:30pm-2:00pm, 1:30pm-3:00pm, 2:00pm-3:30pm and 2:30pm-4:00pm
-If you would like to purchase your tour tickets as a group there is a minimum of 10 participants required
-You will be traversing 1.5 miles of unrestored hospital buildings so be sure to wear proper footwear and the hard hat provided to you, always
Tour departs from:
Ellis Island Office
Historic Hospital Laundry Building, Ellis Island, NJ
Closed for over 60 years, the historic Ellis Island Hospital Complex is now open for guided tours. The 90-minute tour takes you through select buildings and grounds of the hospital.
Contagion sometimes found a home in the crowded third-class sections of ocean liners, with new immigrants arriving on Ellis Island with measles, tuberculosis, influenza, and a variety of other ailments. Others left their ports of departure with any number of health or medical conditions ranging from pregnancy to injuries to mental illness.
Anyone identified by the medical inspectors as unhealthy upon arrival would not be allowed to enter the country and would find themselves in the hospital complex. Here they were cared for in what was, in its day, a state-of-the-art complex. In a place full of hope for a better life, the hospital buildings were islands of both sorrow and redemption.
A sense of both is evoked in the remarkable images pasted in the rooms and hallways, part of the current exhibit by French artist JR, titled Unframed—Ellis Island. The images draw visitors into a world that no longer exists. Rooms filled with quiet anticipation, the massive steel doors of the long silent autoclave, broken windows, half-open walls capture the stories of the Ellis Island Hospital, and the 1.2 million immigrants treated there.
For more information, click here.
