Collections Item Detail

2014.002

Staff / Collected by

Collected by Staff

Museum Collections.

2014 - 2014

Date(s) Created: 2014 Date(s): 2014

Notes: Article text as posted online Friday, Oct. 3, 2014 (print edition: The New York Times, Metropolitan section, Arts/New Jersey, Sunday Oct. 5, 2014) The New York Times Arts | New Jersey New York Harbor From a Different Angle An Exhibition About Immigrants in Hoboken By TAMMY LA GORCE OCT. 3, 2014 --- [photo caption] A photograph of immigrants at Ellis Island. Credit Hoboken Historical Museum [print edition corrected this credit: Library of Congress.] --- “We all come from somewhere,” said Robert Foster, executive director of the Hoboken Historical Museum, speaking of the current exhibition on immigration. “Everybody loves the topic, because there’s a common denominator.” What may be surprising, and what “Hoboken, Ellis Island and the Immigrant Experience, 1892-1924,” which opened in August and is on display through Dec. 23, illuminates, is how often those somewheres converged in Hoboken. During the three decades chronicled in this exhibition, 20 million people immigrated to the United States, and almost half of the 8 million who passed through Ellis Island between 1900 and 1913 docked in Hoboken first, according to the museum’s collections manager. “Many returned to Hoboken to depart for different cities, and many stayed.” Accounting for that are four major passenger ship lines that were based here; the exhibition recalls them with drawings and photographs of local piers and terminals. But those images, positioned at the start of a path that guides visitors through the show, don’t represent the starting point of the immigrant’s story. “These people’s immigration experience started long before they ever got on the ship,” said the guest curator Christina A. Ziegler-McPherson in a recent phone interview from Bremen, Germany. “I wanted to do a social history.” Ms. Ziegler-McPherson explained that those coming to the new world had thought about getting on the ship for a very long time. “There’s this idea that they were these ignorant peasants. They were not,” she said. Dr. Ziegler-McPherson, a public historian who left Hoboken last month for Germany, where she will study and teach on a Fulbright Fellowship until April 2015, compared her move to Europe to the fraught preparations of turn-of-the-century Russian Jewish immigrants, “who knew they were never going back home” because of political turmoil. “I had trouble packing a suitcase for nine months,” she said. “These people had to imagine going for the rest of their lives.” The exhibition ponders the planning for new American lives through stacks of steamer trunks, including a sturdy-looking wicker example that was most likely from Estonia. There is also wall text that tells the story of Johann “John” Steneck, a German-born entrepreneur. Mr. Steneck arrived in Hoboken in 1866 and worked as a bartender. By 1900, he had formed Steneck & Sons, a company that sold steamship tickets, provided traveler’s checks, exchanged money and held powers of attorney for new batches of people traveling at length to reach the U.S. --- [photo caption] A visitor using a stereoviewer at the Hoboken Historical Museum’s immigration exhibition. Credit Hoboken Historical Museum --- Forethought is also suggested by the documents of Maria Thuma Cosulich, a 1923 arrival from what had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Included in the show are her passport, naturalization certificate and second-class ticket for her steamship voyage across the Atlantic. Immigrants like Ms. Cosulich, whose story the museum discovered through her granddaughter, Nancy Boldt of Weehawken, “also needed to have around $50 on their person, and they had to answer the 29 questions.” The 29 questions, posed to all immigrants, were asked twice, first by a crew member, who recorded responses for the ships’ manifests, and then by immigration station inspectors at Ellis Island. The questions, which read more like a checklist and included items like “whether an anarchist” and “whether a polygamist,” are posted on a museum wall. If the exhibition, chock-full of photographs, videos, newspaper clippings and artifacts, makes a point of fanning out the details immigrants considered before they left their native countries, it does an equally thorough job of demonstrating how they affected the first American city to welcome them as citizens. “We have a little more than 50,000 people living in Hoboken today, and we’re a crowded city,” in the early 1900s, at the height of immigration, there were 70,000 people there. “Immigration shaped what we looked like as a city,” he said, because hotels, boardinghouses and other businesses had to be built to accommodate the influx of people. An advertisement in the exhibit for Meyer’s Hotel, a historic Hoboken hotel, includes the promise that it’s near the major shipping lines, including Holland-America, and “equipped with electric elevator.” By the turn of the century roughly 15 percent of Hoboken’s working population, or about 4,600 residents, worked at jobs, from longshoremen to porters, associated with immigration. “A lot of opportunities were created, and a lot of people stayed in Hoboken to work and start their lives here.” A series of 97 sepia-toned portraits taken from 1905 to 1920 by Augustus F. Sherman, a clerk at Ellis Island, offers a glimpse of what the immigrants looked like before they embarked on those lives. “If he were a lesser skilled person, these pictures might have been so-so." They are anything but: Mr. Sherman captured a stew of emotions in his subjects, from pride to elation to fear. Many of the posed portraits, including one of a Moroccan man and another of a pair of Dutch women, show people in their native dress. There are three films in the exhibition: footage borrowed from the Bremen State Film Archives shows life aboard German passenger lines; “Forgotten Ellis Island,” a 2008 PBS documentary, tells the story of Ellis Island’s hospital and the medical screening new immigrants experienced there (for those interested in this topic, a photography installation just opened at the Ellis Island hospital, which had been closed to the public for 60 years); and “Greetings From Little Bremen,” a 2002 documentary, addresses German immigration to Hoboken. An affiliated lecture series includes upcoming discussions of Chinese immigrants in the early 20th century and the vernacular in Italian-American neighborhoods. Mr. Foster hopes these talks will help museum visitors make sense of their own histories. “People have stories about their great-grandmothers coming here, who picked them up at the train station all those years ago,” he said. “They want to connect the dots.” “Hoboken, Ellis Island and the Immigrant Experience, 1892-1924” runs through Dec. 23 at the Hoboken Historical Museum, 1301 Hudson Street. For more information: 201-656-2240 or hobokenmuseum.org. ==== ==== Status: OK Status By: dw Status Date: 2014-10-08