The Representation of Immigrants in American Art and Architecture in New York City, ca. 1850-1920

In mid-nineteenth and early-twentieth century visual and textual investigations of immigration in New York City, architecture was repeatedly invoked to structure, narrate, or otherwise inform the discourse of immigration. The space of immigration as well as the representation of that space was instrumental in creating a manner of looking at both the immigrant and at the nation. Responding to the swelling population and the changing ethnic make-up of the nation, the popular press sought ways of picturing nation, authority, and institutional control. The press frequently relied on architecture to articulate these issues. The architecture of Castle Garden and Ellis Island, together with the portrayal of that architecture, played important roles in holding cultural memory and framing cultural observations. Architecture acted as a site, a place holder, of cultural values and hierarchies. The first half of this dissertation examines the representation of immigration processing and architecture at Castle Garden, the immigration depot in operation from 1855 to 1890, located in the southwest corner of Manhattan. The second portion of the study concerns immigration at Ellis Island, which operated from 1892 until 1924. Chapter One explores the repeated invocation in the popular press of an event from Castle Garden's earlier incarnation as an upper-class theater: the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind's American debut in 1850. The second chapter considers a painting by Charles Ulrich of an immigrant woman nursing her baby at Castle Garden and situates the painting within contemporary discourses on motherhood and eugenics. Turning to Ellis Island, Chapter Three investigates the changes between the first immigration station of Romanesque design, built between 1890 and 1892, and its French Renaissance-style replacement, built between 1897 and 1900. The final chapter considers Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney's exhibition Immigrants in America, of 1915-1916. Portions of the exhibition, a collaboration between Whitney and the Americanization movement, were originally shown at the Whitney Studio and were later exhibited at and donated to Ellis Island