We continue to work closely with the National Park Service and our project partners to make remarkable progress on this $100 million multi-year effort to restore and re-imagine the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration for the 21st Century visitor.  Thanks to your generous support, we are making great strides in upgrading the infrastructure and enhancing the visitor experience.  In this installment of Construction Chronicles, we offer our supporters an inside look at the work underway to transform our family history center, upgrade gallery spaces, select museum artifacts, build the new grand stairwell, and more — all part of the biggest project on the Island since the Museum opened 35 years ago.   

Construction is now underway to reimagine the family history center as the new Records Discovery Center. The redesigned Center will expand opportunities to explore family ancestry, including a mini-theater presentation, interactive discovery stations, and temporary display space, and the number of public research stations will grow by 50 percent.  

Similar to the rest of the museum, we are working on the Center in stages so that, even during construction, the public will continue to discover their family history and access their family records onsite, which is the emotional core of any visit to the Island.    

Workers start to clear out a portion of the family history center on Ellis Island. 

Even with construction underway, visitors to Ellis can still research their families.

Behind the scenes, our team is also working hard to expand our Passenger Search database to include, for the first time, passenger records from ports of entry across the United States – not just Ellis records. When the project is complete, we will have more than doubled our current database from 65 million Port of New York arrival records to more than 150 million arrival records – now including airline manifests in addition to ships from port cities throughout the country. The expanded database, available at the Records Discovery Center in the museum and free online, will allow millions more families to trace their immigration story. 

           Photo Credit: Tom Tolentino

The walls are going up for the new theater inside the former Railroad Ticket Office that will be part of the executive summary gallery on the first floor. This new gallery will offer the millions of annual visitors a chance to digest an inspiring overview of the museum and catch a ferry back in time for more sightseeing in Lower Manhattan.

Historians and curators continue to sift through important artifacts to decide what would be the most compelling items to put on display to help visitors learn about Ellis Island.

The new grand staircase connecting the second and third floors in the museum is starting to take shape. In our last Chronicles, we reported that the construction team was just about to pour the concrete for the foundation of the staircase, and this image shows the progress on the steel framing for the steps, revealing quite a dramatic change.    

Photo Credit: EarthCam

NPS’s contractor continues to repair the historic structure’s exterior, and here you can see the preparation work for new windows to be installed on the front of the building.   

We look forward to continuing to update you on this remarkable multi-phased project to revitalize and restore the museum at Ellis Island.  In our next installment of Chronicles, we will share more construction highlights and will also tell you about how specialists restored a beautiful tapestry honoring John Lennon that depicts Manhattan as a yellow submarine.  The tapestry was first unveiled by Yoko Ono, Bono, and The Edge when it was installed in the museum.