Rendering of the Thesis Project Memorial's Spheres of Memory bowl.
This paper comprises of the written component of my Pratt thesis design project—a COVID-19 memorial on Governors Island in New York Harbor—I explore how illness and quarantine have historically been tied to xenophobia and exclusionary actions in New York City. From smallpox to yellow fever, the islands of New York Harbor have seen many hopeful migrants halted in their pursuit of the American Dream. How do we choose to memorialize the stories of these immigrants after their struggles have ended?
This piece is written with the guidance of my magical thesis advisors Adam Elstein and Frank Gesualdi, as well as my thesis writing advisor Saul Anton.
In December 2019, the first case of SARS-CoV-2, better known as COVID-19, a disease that attacks the upper respiratory tract in humans, was reported in Wuhan, China. Bolstered by international travel, the virus spread rapidly, resulting in 1092 total deaths and 41771 total hospitalizations in New York City alone by the end of March 2022.[1] In a panic, New York City, as well as many other cities around the world, went into lockdown in the face of the evident pandemic, implementing harsh restrictions that require their millions of citizens to give up many of their civil liberties and remain in their homes for the sake of the greater good, raising questions of communal responsibility, personal freedoms, and government overreach. Although uncommon, quarantining in the face of contagious diseases carried by international travellers is far from unprecedented. Many of the foundational immigration Islands in the New York Harbor were built due to similar fear of sicknesses brought by new migrants. In this paper, we explore the architectural history and the usage of Island-based infectious disease facilities in the New York harbour, their ties to travellers, and their public reception, placing in context proposals of future memorial and isolation hospitals for contagious diseases reflecting upon the COVID-19 pandemic.
Immigration and globalization have long been an aspect of New York City, fundamentally shaping New York's institutions, population, and identity. By 1910, it is estimated that 41 percent of the city's population was foreign-born, maintaining until the 21st century as 37% of the population in 2010.[2] However, this mass displacement of people also came with the propagation of diseases - ships arriving in New York carrying yellow fever in 1793 led to the creation of the New York City Health Department when the disease claimed the lives of thousands.[3] Over the next few centuries, this department would oversee the control of many diseases common to sea travellers in the 19th and 20th centuries: Smallpox, yellow fever, cholera, typhus, and typhoid fever. Thus, as the history of disease in New York City is fundamentally tied to maritime travel, the history of infectious disease control is also linked to the islands of New York's Upper and Lower Bays, which served as zones of entry and disinfection between the "clean" city and the "infected" passengers.
The Enemy – Quarantining as Defence for Diseased Foreignness
New York's first law on quarantine measures was recorded in 1758 when Bedloe Island (known as Liberty Island today) was used as a quarantine ground. Another act in 1796 further provided Nutten Island (known now as Governor's Island) with funds to build a maritime quarantine hospital, or a lazaretto, that housed both the sick and those who had come into contact with them. However, due to a Yellow Fever Outbreak in 1798, Nutten Island and Liberty Island were deemed too close to Manhattan to keep New Yorkers safe, and the Act of 1799, calling for the construction of the New York Marine Hospital on Staten Island, was passed. [1]
Public health scholar Kathryn Stephenson chronicles the rise and burning of the New York Marine Hospital, aptly nicknamed the 'Quarantine.' One of the first traveller-focused medical quarantine facilities in New York and housing up to 8000 passengers a year, the 'Quarantine' was constructed on Staten Island in 1799 to isolate travellers who have who might have infectious diseases. In parallel with some of the strictest COVID-19 procedures today, each passenger entering the New York Harbor must undergo a rigorous inspection to ensure their health, and if even one is found sick, the entire ship is redirected to the Quarantine. However, to facilitate passengers' isolation, staff- medical and hospitality- working in the hospital were placed at significant risk for the disease due to being in close proximity to the patients.[2]
The Quarantine did not last long. On September 1, 1858, a mob of locals, driven partly by xenophobic rhetoric about immigrants carrying diseases, partly due to perceiving the hospital as stunting the economy, and partly due to the team of workers employed by the quarantine being numerous enough to swing the local election, burned the hospital to the ground. During the following trial, the movements and alleged criminal actions of the foreign stevedores were cited as passing yellow fever to the residents of Staten Island. Despite citing panic and fear, however, Stephensen argues that the burning of the Marine Hospital was an organized and premeditated effort, which, failing to evacuate the residents of the Quarantine and instead firing shots at them, was carried out as an act of vengeance. Ultimately, the incident was ruled in the arsonist's favour, with the judge – who had himself argued for the removal of the Quarantine to the State legislators just nine years prior- defending the freedoms of citizens as an "oppressed community rebelling against tyrannical forces," a sentiment that would be echoed in the history of pandemic control and quarantine measures centuries later.
The site for quarantining diseased travellers, then, was temporarily moved in 1895 to a ship named the Florence Nightingale before being moved further outwards into New York's Lower Bay, situating itself in the artificially constructed Swinburne and Hoffman Islands (Constructed in 1873). In the 1920s, medical facilities were relocated to Ellis Island to accommodate the influx of immigrants arriving in New York City through the immigration stronghold, which numbered upwards of twelve million per year. By the mid-1950s, however, the islands had fallen into ruin, with the government razing the entire island in 1961. Both islands are now owned by the National Park Service and closed to the public.
The Memorial – Ellis Island's Curation of the American Migrant
Sentiments regarding immigration and quarantine began to shift in the late 20th century as the attitude towards foreign migrants shifted from one of suspicious exclusion to being an integral aspect of the economic and social growth of the great American Cities. One of the most prominent examples is the reconstruction and opening of the Ellis Island Museum throughout the 1900s. Throughout the 1920s and the 1950s, during the Great Depression, World War II, and the Red Scare, the Ellis Island Memorial served as a screening checkpoint and a detention and deportation center for immigrants. By 1954, the Immigration and Naturalization Service abandoned the island, and its buildings fell into disrepair like so many other quarantine islands before it. Midway through the 1960s, however, public attitudes regarding the civil rights movement and policies regarding political immigrants, as well as the recognization of immigration as essential to the continuation of economic growth, led to the reclaiming of Ellis Island as an integral part of America's ethnic heritage. This sentiment was further compounded by the opening of the Liberty Island Museum in 1972 and by the 1990s, the prospective Ellis Island Museum, through the cooperation of public memorial campaigns such as donating one hundred dollars to list each family that has passed through Ellis Island- and commercial development, has raised more than $250 million for construction. The Ellis Island Memorial Museum opened on September 10, 1990.[1]
The museum was controversial, as some saw it as glorifying a less-than-romantic past and naturalizing the suffering of current migrants seeking asylum in the United States. While others saw it as a triumph for representing the immigrants as active decision-makers in their experience and Americanization rather than victims that are acted upon by the greater outside forces, allowing the visitor to project their own lives onto the ones of the immigrants. [2] This discourse saw the doubling down of the museum's design around creating a controlled story of the American migrant.
Maddern expresses the two kinds of ghosts the memorial evokes - the Uncanny and the Conjured. The Uncanny is designed to produce affects – whether awe or spectrality. The author Kevin Hetherington suggests that the uncanny is produced through the concept of temporality through unsettling the order of space, remaining in time where belonging has expired and thus blurring the order of space through the folding of time. This process creates an affect where one is simultaneously in and out of place, which introduces a sense of strangeness through unexpected intrusions. The Ellis Island Museum evokes the uncanny by carefully curating a deliberately derelict landscape, allowing for the emptiness between elements to speak between themselves, which heightens the sense of the user's relationship to the latent humanity of abandoned architecture. Extensive discussions took place during the renovation of the museum for its public opening in 1990 as to how much of the museum should be rebuilt and how much of the original ruins were kept. Early historian visitors to the site cite the ruination and the haphazard paraphernalia left by the previous inhabitants of the immigration station as creating the most evocative portraits of the island's history, with one saying, "You would go into some offices [and] it was like the people had just left. I mean, their coats were still hanging on the hooks; there were shoes in their lockers. It was almost like people just left."[3]To restore the museum, then, is to move from the realm of the uncanny to the realm of the conjured.
The Conjured refers to producing stories and affects through deliberate strategies, whether authentic or not. Maddern argues that conjuration is a tool often used by media, telecommunications, and tourism industries where the presence of the conjured ghost justifies the veneer of authentication. Unlike the uncanny, which creates an affect by emphasizing the existing temporal contrast of the preexisting artifacts to the current time and visitor, the conjured deliberately edits or even falsifies a controlled story, usually for a political or commercial purpose. On Ellis Island, conjuration takes place by filling the museum rooms with the collected voices of former migrants through a database of oral histories. After the broad collection of audio recordings, the museum curators selectively choose oral histories that would conjure up a carefully controlled image of the history of American immigration that is more of a product of a standardized and regurgitated American dream rather than voicing individual dissent. These recordings, in turn, are then made available through headsets throughout the museum through an illusion of different choices, creating the foundation of the visitor's understanding of the immigration experience.
Further conjuration includes removing architectural elements in the Great Hall of the Museum, intending to have the visitor fill the vast void with the images and feelings extracted from the carefully crafted oral histories. In constructing the emptiness, the museum avoids the reality of the crowded and unpleasant experience a historical occupant would have while ushered through the alien process of the immigration process. In this erasure also lies the second key element of conjuration, where actual events are gentrified and rationalized to appeal to a commercial audience.
Ultimately, the Ellis Island Museum is a feat of biopolitical narrative crafting that tastefully creates a standardized and sanitized image of the American Migrant through the careful assemblage of uncanny existing structures and evocation of conjured experiences. This curated account erases both the unseemly hardships of the individual migrant and propagates a rewritten version of American Migrant hospitality, starkly contrasting the complex and ongoing discussions today around disease and immigration.
The Present – Coronavirus and Immigration Discourse in the 21st Century
Currently, New York City sees over 750 000 international passengers arriving by sea annually and an additional 127,850,557 travellers by air via the Newark, John F. Kennedy and LaGuardia Airports.[1] However, this was shut down during the 2019 Coronavirus pandemic, when international travel became extremely constricted to necessary emergency travel. Thus the conversation on the biopolitics of disease and human migration, long relegated to curated tales presented in historical museums, came back as a thriving dialogue. Where the past surveillance has been based on physical locations of mass quarantine, modern disease control is mobile and detached, with the ability to collect a wide range of data leading to the narrowing of the scope of the border from checkpoints to individual bodies.
One of the most impactful consequences of the pandemic is the implementation of emergency measures and digital passes that monitored and regulated the movement of billions through the validation of their COVID-19 status. This is achieved through extensive legislation and regulations that control cross-border travel and, in countries such as Italy, France, Australia and China, dictate travel in and out of a local zone based on a colour code system of red, orange and yellow. For those who are in a higher risk zone, such as red, the law prohibits them from travelling to a lower risk zone until the rating of their location is dropped to orange or yellow, establishing bodily boundaries based on not only one's health conditions but the health conditions of those around them, even if they had never interacted with each other previously. Although these restrictions were met with fierce protests worldwide, polls in France show that most citizens support travel-restricting regulations like the healthpass, which incentivized people to get vaccinated or tested every 72 hours. Furthermore, governments like the EU and many airlines have introduced pre- and post-travel regulation and control layers to balance health concerns and reopen international travel. Safety protocols require passengers to show proof that they are not carriers of the virus, passing a multilayered review process of vaccination proof and disease testing. Even citizens with every right to return home faced significant difficulties in returning to their home countries from an international destination due to the numerous regulations such as population caps and extraterritorial processing– Canada, for example, does not allow citizens to board a plane going back to Canada unless they have been tested negative, shifting the responsibility of testing to a foreign land.
Furthermore, this increased biopolitical control significantly impacted different categories of travellers during the pandemic, such as refugees. Under the thin pretext of disease protection during the pandemic, governments had a rationale to reject asylum seekers' claims for protection without the requisite preliminary evaluation or personalized assessment. In the United States, for example, the agencies of US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) rewrote the existing Migrant protection protocols to return asylum seekers from Mexico with pending legal cases back across the border under the excuse of protecting Americans from foreign diseases. Meanwhile, European nations Cyprus, Greece, Hungary, and Spain have imposed a total ban on asylum seekers in order to safeguard their residents from COVID-19, and Italy and Malta declared their ports unsafe for travel, going as far as quarantining asylum seekers arriving at their ports on chartered tourist vessels in international waters, forbidding them even to set foot on the country's ground in order to avoid the activation of the migrant seeking process. [2]
The pandemic has also inspired the rise of conspiracy theories and xenophobic identities, particularly amongst radical right-wing groups who responded to the development of domestic political stresses surrounding work and family with significant propaganda against immigrants or the existing political order. Studies that examined statements from six European far-right groups from February 22, 2020, to April 22, 2020, found that they blamed migration for the spread of COVID-19 and saw closed borders as the best means of response, making up an average of 35.1% of the material released during that time. This sentiment was particularly heavy in Identitarian groups, making up 65.7% of material released by the Hundred-Handers. This attitude also extended to anti-globalization sentiments, highlighting instances of immigrants breaking lockdown rules and posting statements such as "multiculturalism kills" next to COVID-19 designs. In a way, much like the angry citizens of Staten Island once did, these groups also raised concerns about the overextension of governmental power over its citizens, while chafing at the lack of perceived governance regarding open borders.[3] Meanwhile, protests arose from other ends of the political spectrum concerning the detention conditions where the migrants are held, placing them at high risk of contracting the disease due to cramped living conditions, poor ventilation, and restriction against personal protective equipment. These protests saw hunger strikes and demonstrations and were responded to with extreme force through pepper spray and balls. [4]
The rise of extreme rhetoric in this crisis frame brought up the need for a new dialogue and memorial for this new pandemic, one that responds to the multifaceted discourse of this new era, which, while echoes the discourse before, has a new depth with the advancement of technology.
Conclusion
The impact of COVID-19 on migration and asylum seekers has been significant, as illustrated by historical analysis of migrant checkpoints. The disease has always been tied to the control of the flow of people across borders, with attitudes towards immigration restriction illustrated through the unfolding of the history of quarantine policies locally in the New York Upper Bay islands and is still echoed in the current dialogues surrounding the pandemic. Past attempts at memorialization, such as the Ellis Island Museum, crafts a particular biopolitical narrative and present a sanitized picture of the American migrant and whitewash the individual's sufferings. With the advancement of time and technology, the points of control have shifted from physical locations of isolated islands to individual bodies, where data collection is essential for monitoring and stopping the flow of migrants before they have even left their starting points. Hence we must once more break away from a conjured narrative and instead focus on the need to reconsider not only the position pandemics have on globalization but also how we continue this dialogue to future generations.
Introduction
[1] “Covid-19: Data.” COVID-19: Data Archive - NYC Health. Accessed March 5, 2023 https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data-archive.page.
[2] Foner, Nancy. “1. Immigration History and the Remaking of New York.” New York and Amsterdam, 2020, 29–51. https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9780814738092.003.0002.
[3] Stephenson, Kathryn. “The Quarantine War: The Burning of the New York Marine, Hospital in 1858.” Public Health Reports 119, no. no.1 (2004): 79–92.
The Enemy
[1] Kraut, Alan M. “Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and American Efficiency, 1890-1924.” Social Science History 12, no. 4 (1988): 377–94. https://doi.org/10.2307/1171380.
[2] Stephenson, Kathryn. “The Quarantine War: The Burning of the New York Marine, Hospital in 1858.” Public Health Reports 119, no. no.1 (2004): 79–92.
The Celebration
[1] Smith, Judith. “Celebrating Immigration History at Ellis Island.” American Quarterly 44, no. 1 (March 1992): 82. https://doi.org/10.2307/2713181.
[2] Maddern, Jo Frances. “Spectres of Migration and the Ghosts of Ellis Island.” Cultural Geographies 15, no. 3 (2008): 359–81. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44251221.
[3] Ibib
The Present
[1] “Data & Statistics Airport Traffic Statistics.” Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Airport Traffic Statistics. Accessed May 4, 2023. https://www.panynj.gov/airports/en/statistics-general-info.html.
[2] Shachar , Ayelet, and Aaqib Mahmood . “The Body as the Border: A New Era.” Historical Social Research/ Historische Sozialforschung 46 , no. Places of Control (2021): 124–50.
[3] McNeil-Willson, Richard. “Framing in Times of Crisis: Responses to COVID-19 amongst Far Right Movements and Organisations.” International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, June 2022. https://doi.org/10.19165/2020.1.04.
[4] Kishi, Roudabeh, and Aaron Wolfson. “A National Emergency: How COVID-19 Is Fueling Unrest in the US .” Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project , March 2021. https://doi.org/http://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep30039.
留言