Ellis Island

Bowing to protests from preservationists, the National Park Service has withdrawn plans to demolish 12 historic buildings on Ellis Island for a hotel and conference center. "We're going back to the planning stages," spokesman Manny Strumpf said Friday. The Center Development Corp. of New York had proposed a plan to build a $140 million hotel and conference center. Under the plan, 20 buildings on the island would be restored and 12 others, including a contagious-disease ward and a morgue, would be razed.

On a recent picture perfect autumn afternoon, I and my two brothers made a pilgrimage to discover our second-generation American roots that were set down over 85 years ago in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, on a small patch of land located in the middle of gritty New York Harbor, which is better known as Ellis Island. After walking through the great hall and viewing the various exhibits, I realized, to my surprise, that the Spirit of Ellis Island and the immigrant experience is just as relevant today in the 1990s, as our country prepares to meet the challenges of an uncertain global economic future, as it was at the turn of the century.

The nation's chief immigration officer yesterday invited lawyers with immigration concerns to hold their 1992 convention on the now-abandoned southern end of Ellis Island. He was met with murmurs. The immigration chief said the abandoned end of Ellis could also become "an educational center, for foreign students when they come to this country, or for American students when they go abroad. "How about a week on Ellis Island?" for such students, he said. He was met with outright laughter.

Ellis Island is really three islands, a symmetrical landfill in the Upper Bay, built atop a muddy mound with dirt and debris from the construction, a century ago, of Manhattan's earliest subways. They are small rectangles of land, less than 28 acres in all, clustered in the harbor's marshy tide-wash and connected at their corners around a narrow ferry channel - just a few thousand feet north of the Statue of Liberty. Between 1892 and 1954, but especially between the closing years of the 19th century and the opening salvos of World War I, Ellis Island's brooding cluster of buildings - some grand, some sinister - was the chief port of entry for an unprecedented tide of immigrants, more than 17 million people, most of them tired, many of them poor, all of them homeless and yearning.

Morry Helzner was born in the Crimea shortly before the Russian Revolution. He left his homeland when he was only 7 - the same age as his grandson, who last week darted around the immaculate Helzner living room in Rhawnhurst. "I don't like that," Helzner, 76, said, a stern expression on his normally cheerful face. "If you want to be in here, sit and listen. " Andrew Levy obediently sat on the sofa next to his 10-year-old brother, Scott, who was already listening intently to the old man's memories.

I heard that there's some sort of "castle" in New York where immigrants used to be processed before Ellis Island opened. Can you tell me where it is, and whether people can go to see it? The site, called Castle Garden at the time, was used as an immigrant landing depot from 1855 to 1890 (Ellis Island facilities opened in 1892) and processed more than eight million immigrants. It was originally constructed as a fort at the tip of Manhattan Island in the early 1800s to protect American ships from British attacks.

The longstanding battle between New Jersey and New York over Ellis Island resumed yesterday with legal arguments before the nation's highest court on the question of which state has jurisdiction over a big chunk of the historic island. But after lawyers for each side used carefully measured words to highlight their respective points to the justices, the top law-enforcement official from each state took the fight outside - to the cameras that waited on the alabaster steps of the U.S. Supreme Court building.

GETTING TO ELLIS ISLAND. Visitors to the newly reopened Ellis Island are having to cope with two problems. One is that the lines for the ferries are long; the other is that the new $6 cost of ferry tickets makes a trip to the island an expensive proposition, especially for families. There are two places to catch the Circle Line boats for the 10-minute ride to the Immigration Museum and other exhibits: Liberty State Park in Jersey City and Battery Park on Manhattan's southern tip. The lines have been so long that at times would-be visitors have been turned back in mid-afternoon.

Five wooden benches stained dark brown. Stained, also, with dreams and fears and the perspiration of nations. They are benches from Ellis Island, that famous way station for immigrants, and they have been on loan to the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies since 1976. The benches have been part of Balch's educational program. Students sit on them, students learn about them. But late last year, the National Park Service, which is in the midst of refurbishing and reopening Ellis Island, said it wanted the benches back.

Your grandma may have thought she stepped ashore in New York when she came to America, but the Supreme Court ruled yesterday that, in fact, there's a good chance she landed in New Jersey. By a 6-3 vote, the high court agreed with New Jersey's attorneys that the deed to most of Ellis Island - port of entry for 17 million immigrants from 1892 to 1954, and long declared an official landmark of New York City - should be moved across the river to the Garden State. New York will retain a crucial sliver of the island's 28 acres: the dock where boats from the city land, the museum that 2 million people visit each year and the ground in between.

NEW YORK - Museums and historic sites, and a trendy new Tribeca restaurant inspired by an old-school Catskills resort. They're all part of Jewish New York, with a heritage that stretches back 400 years and a vital contemporary community that's reinterpreting old traditions for the 21st century. New York City has the largest concentration of Jews in the world outside of Israel, according to the Jewish Databank, which put the city's Jewish population at 1.4 million in 2002. The stories of European Jews who arrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are relatively well-known and easy to find in places such as the Lower East Side.

We've managed to acquire a remarkable family Hanukkah gift: a ship's manifest, an official passenger log that tracks my late mother-in-law's voyage to America in 1920. It's a taproot to family history, part of our clan's collective "Coming to America" story. Had she not made that voyage, nothing would be the same. Hinda Rubache came to these shores and through Ellis Island as a young woman of 22. She sailed from the city of Minsk in Russia, though her immigration papers say Poland because of the ever-changing borders.

Planning a trip with the kids? Here is ShermansTravel.com's list of the best places to go. 1. Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, New York City 2. Fenway Park, Boston 3. Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve, Alaska 4. Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona 5. Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, Fla. 6. San Diego Zoo, San Diego 7. The Smithsonian, ...

Ellis Island figures in so many American family histories that any artist who addresses the last century's great wave of European immigration plugs into a ready-made constituency. So it is with the 28 striking color images, now on display at Doylestown's Michener Art Museum, that New York photographer Stephen Wilkes made at the immigrant gateway between 1998 and 2003. Wilkes worked not in the vast arrivals hall where the intrepid newcomers were processed but in the sprawling 29-building hospital complex.

Art Museums & Institutions African American Heritage Museum 661 Jackson Rd., Newtonville; 609-704-5495. www.aahmsnj.org . Tanya Murphy Dodd. Leonard R. Wilkinson Jr.. Donations accepted. Tue.-Fri. 10 am-3 pm. Barnes Foundation 300 N Latchs La., Merion Station; 610-667-0290. www.barnesfoundation.org . Docent-led Gallery Tours. Thru 8/31: Wed.-Sun. 9:30 am-5 pm. Brandywine River Museum Rte. 1 & Rte. 100, Chadds Ford; 610-388-2700. www.brandywinemuseum.

IMMIGRANT-bashing goes back through our history. In the 1840s, we had the "Irish riots" in Philadelphia. On May 8, 1844, after three days of anti-Catholic, anti-Irish rioting, St. Augustine's Catholic Church at 4th and New streets was burned to the ground by a nativist mob. Subsequent new arrivals got similar hospitality. Yet today we think the latest wave of immigrants are different from earlier ones, one of the points being that immigrant Mexicans are frequently illegal, while our ancestors were all legal.

The Kennett Symphony Orchestra is taking a new tack in an attempt to spread the word about its June concert premiere of Peter Boyer's Ellis Island: The Dream of America. For the first time, the orchestra is sponsoring a competition for high school students that doesn't involve instruments or voices. Instead, teenagers are being invited to submit essays, posters, and PowerPoint presentations about immigration, the theme of Boyer's work. Applicants don't have to be residents of Chester County.

The building - six stories of red brick on a midcity side street - is as nondescript as such structures come. But for an immigrant on a citizenship quest it can be more important than the White House. In the words of one, it is "Philadelphia's Ellis Island. " Gone are the telltale sidewalk lines of anxious newcomers who spoke nervously into their cell phones in a babel of languages as they inched forward with hope in their hearts and documents in hand. The computer-based Infopass system instituted three years ago to increase security and alleviate crowding has made appointments the norm at the Philadelphia office of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

The rivers flow with milk, the farms yield fruit and vegetables of boulder size, and the trees, yes, well, money grows on those trees. For the simple Sicilian immigrants of Emanuele Crialese's gorgeous, whimsically surreal The Golden Door, America of the early 20th century was not just the land of opportunity - it was like some enchanted Oz, beckoning, glowing gold. A wide-screen epic that turns the historic journeys of millions of Ellis Island immigrants into a poignant and intimate odyssey, The Golden Door is a richly rewarding, wildly imaginative gem. Crialese, an Italian filmmaker who trained at New York University, follows the daunting expedition of a Sicilian widower, Salvatore Mancuso (Vincenzo Amato)