The Barge Office

The Barge Office in the Battery, New York City.
Public Domain.

Herman Volke, a locksmith from Saxe-Weimar who had just crossed the Atlantic aboard the Hamburg-American steamer Columbia, was among the first half of the 734 steerage passengers to board the transfer boat William Fletcher and to come alongside the Barge Office dock. It was April 19, 1890, and Volke, at shortly before ten o’clock in the morning, would become the first immigrant to be registered at the new, just-opened immigrant depot in the Battery of New York. As he was giving his name and age to the clerk, he was handed a five-dollar gold piece and heartily congratulated by the superintendent. Volke and his wife, both grateful for the welcome, shook the superintendent’s hand enthusiastically and expressed their thanks in German. Then, heading towards Pittsburgh along with the dog and cat who had made the voyage with them, they disappeared into their history.

Construction was still going on inside the Barge Office on this first day of business, but this didn’t seem to cause any problems. Nugent’s bar and lunch counter was bustling. There was only one detention this day. A cable from Liverpool had preceded the arrival of a William Henry Hopkinson of Lincoln, England, with the news that Hopkinson had abandoned his wife and children and taken passage on the Germanic with a young woman named Ellen Kelly. Travelling as Mr. and Mrs. Hill, they were detained. Eventually the couple admitted their actual identities. Hopkinson protested that he had left his family with money and was simply on his way to Kansas City to find work. Kelly, who is described as “young and pretty,” had friends in Hartford and would easily find work there. The superintendent allowed them to land.

Another view of the Barge Office.
Public Domain.

There were other stories of the heart. Christopher Kruisler, for instance, who had immigrated several years before. A Bavarian from Würtemberg, Kruisler was a diminutive man who had become betrothed to Marie Epple, also from Würtemberg, before he had come to America. Kruisler saved the money he had earned as a cigar-box maker and sent for Marie, who arrived at the Barge Office on July 9, 1891, after a crossing on the SS Rhynland. Kruisler had been waiting behind the wooden railing which separated the passengers from those waiting to meet them. When he saw Marie, he excitedly began to dance. Marie was unable to hide her disappointment upon seeing Kruisler. According to The New York Times, “The fair Marie thought that he would grow, perhaps.” They reported,“Evidently the climate of America had done nothing to increase his stature, as she fondly hoped that it would.” After Marie was admitted, and they were finally brought together, Marie told Kruisler that she had changed her mind. There would be no wedding. She said that she “was content to remain plain Marie Epple for the present.” The Times closes,“After a long and stormy interview the crestfallen lover left his faithless sweetheart and went away vowing to kill himself.”

The Statue of Liberty at its unveiling
in 1886. It would still have been this
dull copper color in 1891.
Puiblic Domain.

It was May Day of 1891 when aboard the SS Rhynland Carmine and Cristina with their children sailed into New York Bay. In Italy, there would still be snow on the Mainarde. The fields below San Vincenzo would have been burned and cleared and ready for the new crop. It was now time to plant. There would be bud break on the grape vines, the new leaves bright green in the sun. On its way to a Hudson River pier, the ship would pass the Statue of Liberty on its port side. The passengers would crowd the ship’s rails to view the American colossus, parents lifting their children onto their shoulders so they could see and remember. They would also pass Ellis Island, still under construction, not to open as the new immigrant depot until January 1, 1892. To starboard was Lower Manhattan and the Battery. The immigrants perhaps would have noticed the circular, sandstone walls of Castle Garden, the old fort which a generation ago had become an entertainment venue, hosting such shows as the famous soprano Jenny Lind and the dancer Lola Montez, former lover of both Franz Liszt and King Ludwig I of Bavaria, who danced here her notorious “Spider Dance.” In 1855, Castle Garden became the immigrant depot for the Port of New York. It would serve in this capacity until 1890. Six years later, it would become the New York City Aquarium, which for nearly fifty years would be one of New York’s most popular attractions.

Lower Manhattan and the Battery, 1900. Castle Garden can be
seen at the far right.
Public Domain.

The Rhynland would dock that morning on the Hudson, where the saloon and second-class passengers would disembark. The steerage passengers would be made to wait, held back by Red Star Line officials. They would be given a letter of the alphabet identifying their ship and a number, their number from the ship’s manifest. Carmine would be number 18; Cristina, 19; Emiddio, 20; Vincenzo, 21; and little Maria, 22. The immigrants would not be allowed to disembark here. Not quite understanding what was happening to them, they would be herded onto one of the broad-decked harbor boats supplied by the Bureau of Immigration. Aboard these boats, hundreds at a time with all of their belongings, the immigrants were ferried to the dock of the Barge Office, where they would wait on board, shoulder to shoulder, until there was room for them to disembark. On land for the first time in two weeks, they would be divided into groups according to their letter and number. They would learn to wait. Standing in line, crouching, maybe sitting on a bundle, they waited anxiously for what one immigrant described as “the nearest earthly likeness to the final Day of Judgment, when we have to prove our fitness to enter Heaven.”

A New York Times Magazine article of the time comments, “The Italian is the immigrant of the hour. The boot that is Humbert’s domain [a reference to Italy’s King Umberto I] seems to be leaking, and if you, oh! man, who reads and studies, should stand in the Barge Office day after day for a while you would think that every Italian town and village, yes, and every hillside, was being deserted in the race for the dollars of America.” The writer continues, referring to the Italian immigration as “the migration of the ‘Dago,’ as we have come to call him, and which does not seem an inappropriate term as the raw product is seen at the Battery before he has ‘squeezed through. . . .’”

Babies wail. Shouts of “Move on! Move on!” harass the immigrants, who shuffle their belongings along ahead of them. A woman loses her grip on a bundle tied up in some rags, and it comes undone, spilling its contents of a kitchen pot and other kitchen odds and ends. Gradually, the group is pushed and shoved upstairs to the area known as “the pens,” where the groups are kept together for examination. The medical examination would follow, much like the one they had endured in Antwerp. Here they would be marked with chalk and detained if there was a problem: “H” for heart, “K” for a hernia, “X” for a mental defect. The following description appeared in The New York Magazine:

Briefly, the inspection is a simple one. With health and a little money a man, no matter how great his family, is considered a desirable immigrant. The doors of the promised land fly open at a touch. Vigor and a cash capital of about $20 will carry the foreigner and his household through the lines without trouble. The vigor is evident to the doctors who scan each man, two or three watching the line in review, one for certain sorts of physical defects, another for conditions of health of another order. Thus a man is sometimes ordered abruptly out of the line. Another! Both doctors were rigid. This immigrant had an [infection] of the eyes, (the doctor noticed it by the way he walked). As to finance, the wanderer from abroad must hand up his little hoard to the Inspector for counting. With the best of the Italians who come here this consists of a few pitiful greasy bits of paper money, a coin or two, too few to even jingle.

The writer describes the appearance of a young woman before the inspector:

There is standing before the Inspector Angiolina Felicetta with $12.15 in her little purse. She has come to join her husband, who, it is afterward found, is waiting for her in the crowd outside. He has come ahead to test America. All is seemingly propitious; the girl wife has come over to join him. She is but seventeen, a slip of a Neapolitane. A clumsy-fitting frock of green and yellow stripes sets badly on her girlish figure. The white cotton lace on it is torn and soiled. She wears carpet slippers, and on her head a gay fazzoletta di testa (handkerchief) is coquettishly entwined. Angiolina, according to American canons, is dirty. In Italy you would kodak her at once, and fresh off the steamship she has not lost her Old World charm. For with the green and yellow stripes there is a gorgeous pink ribbon about her neck and in her hand a yellow and green basket – her entire wardrobe.

After the examination, the immigrant might be approached by a representative of the Italian Bureau, a agency of the Italian government. These officials attempted to identify immigrants who might be victims of the padrone system, in which a person might have contracted his labor in return for his passage. The officials of the Italian Bureau would record the entries of as many Italians as they could in the performance of their duties. Finally, actually inside the Barge Office, were ticketing agents for the railroads. The passengers would be ferried across the Hudson to the New Jersey shore to catch their trains. Carmine and Cristina arrived during a price war on trains travelling to Chicago and points west set off by a squabble between the Central Traffic and Trunk Line Association, who booked the travel on the various railroads for the immigrants, and the Chicago and Alton Railroad which resulted in the latter being granted their own agent within the Barge Office. Dazed, disoriented, and exhausted, Carmine and Cristina would not have understood this. Nor would they have understood the crush of people outside the Barge Office. Relatives and friends of immigrants, or just the curious, sometimes numbering into the hundreds, lined the street. Brass-buttoned, loud, and carrying sticks, policemen and detectives were present to “keep order.” A relative rushing forward to greet a newly arrived immigrant would be beaten back with shoves and sticks, regardless of the offender’s sex. In later years of the Barge Office, a homeless man by the name of Cripps, who slept in a box on the pier, took up his cane to do his part to manage the crowd. According to The New York Times,

He yells as savagely as the rest, and, being fiercer of countenance, his orders are more quickly obeyed than those of the authorized guardians of the peace. Nobody dares face the glitter in the eye of “Cripps,” and before his gaze Italians, Huns, Greeks, and men of various nationalities wither away in mortal fear and venture no more in reach of his eye or cane. He, without a smile and confident of his supreme authority over all “furriners,” never flinches in his duty.

Carmine and Cristina collapsed into their seats on the train. The children, too, having survived this “Day of Judgment,” were quiet. Perhaps, Cousin Giovanni and his family were also on this train, along with some of the others from San Vincenzo. All needed to rest. All would try. I imagine Emiddio, leaning his head against the window, watching the passage of wilderness, of isolated farms, of small towns with their unfamiliar architecture. From New York and New Jersey, they would travel west through Pennsylvania, then Ohio and Indiana, through the lands of great peoples now gone: the Pequot, the Iroquois, the Munsee, and the Susquehanna, on through the lands of the Erie and the Miami. Emiddio would not have been aware of this. After the dark came, he would see nothing. All would be black except for the occasional farmhouse with a coal-oil lamp flickering orange and yellow in a window. Nothing else would break the darkness, not for miles, not until the next farmhouse seen in the distance across the flat land.

In Italy during these first days of May, across the mountains some miles north of San Vincenzo, in the village of Cocullo, continuing a tradition going back to the Dark Ages and according to some back to the snake goddess worshipped by the Marsi, the Italic tribe who joined with the Samnites against the Romans, the serpari were gathering their snakes for the festival. Only certain snakes were chosen, all non-venomous: four-lined snakes, aesculapian, grass, and green whip snakes. The feast day for the patron saint of Cocullo occurred at this time on the first Thursday in May. Promptly at noon on this day, the effigy of San Domenico would begin his procession through the village. San Domenico is believed to be a mediator between the harsh realities of the world and the people who must suffer them. As San Domenico is carried through the village, the snakes are laid at his feet, around his shoulders and arms, up his legs. Snakes wrap around snakes. Thus, the villagers pass on to their beloved saint all that endangers them. It is their hope, their belief, that he will somehow strike a deal, a deal that will grant them all a better world.