Philadelphia’s version of Ellis Island was the Washington Avenue Immigration Station
After a stop at a hospital, immigrants were processed at Washington Avenue Immigration Station.
There was a time when the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island welcomed the tired, the poor, the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” But, it wasn’t merely a New York thing.
Philadelphia’s immigration station opened 19 years before Ellis Island’s, yet it wasn’t as high-profile as the one in the Big Apple.
Leaving a reader, whose immigrant grandfather docked in Philadelphia, to ask Curious Philly, The Inquirer’s forum for questions about the city and region: How many immigrants came through Philly as opposed to Ellis Island? Where did they land?
Philadelphia’s Ellis Island
Washington Avenue Immigration Station, which operated from 1873 to 1915, can be considered Philadelphia’s Ellis Island. But it wasn’t the first place new arrivals docked at.
After months of crowded quarters on a ship, at times without food or a sense of privacy, and sometimes ill, travelers docked at a hospital south of Philadelphia International Airport.
The Georgian structure of Lazaretto Quarantine Station was the first immigrants saw of the United States and Philly, before moving down the Delaware River to the Washington Avenue Immigration Station.
Lazaretto came to be after a transatlantic yellow fever epidemic killed about 5,000 Philadelphians in 1793 All ships bound to Philly were then required to stop at the Essington hospital for a health check first. Ill immigrants and crew were placed in quarantine, and the cargo deemed infected was destroyed.
“It was probably fearful for some if they didn’t speak English, and there certainly were dangers there, people trying to take advantage of them,” said Mike Flynn, executive vice president and chief operating Officer at Independence Seaport Museum.
If deemed healthy, migrants were allowed to go to the Washington Avenue Immigration Station. A historic marker on Christopher Columbus Boulevard, close to the U.S. Coast Guard Station on Washington Avenue, commemorates the site.
“For many of them this was a chance at a brand new life and wherever they came from, whatever hardships they had, this was a choice to make their lives and their family lives better,” Flynn said. “There was a lot of excitement, some terror for the unknown, but a lot of excitement of finally getting a chance for the American dream.”
» READ MORE: How to access records for Philly’s Washington Avenue Immigration Station
How many immigrants came through Philly?
In the 62 years Ellis Island operated, from 1892 to 1954, more than 12 million immigrants docked through that port, according to the National Park Service.
More than one million immigrants are estimated to have arrived in Philadelphia from Europe during the 44 years the Washington Avenue station operated, according to the paper “Philadelphia: Immigrant City” by late Temple University curator of the Urban Archives Fredric M. Miller.
Philadelphia’s closeness to the Pennsylvania Railroad made it a strategic place for incoming travelers to stay and find work or hop on a train for other pastures.
“Opportunity was so big, so [much] that immigration influx was helping the city, the state and the country grow with factories, business and stuff like that,” Flynn said.
Exact numbers vary depending on the source, but the average annual number of immigrants during the station’s operating years ranged from 7,000 during the late 1870s to almost 50,000 from 1910 to 1914, according to Miller’s research.
By the mid-1870s, over a quarter of Philadelphia’s population was foreign born, according to Miller, particularly from Ireland, Germany, England, and Scotland.
What happened to Washington Avenue Immigration Station?
For all the people who passed through the dock, “Washington Avenue Station is somewhat forgotten,” Flynn said.
Where Ellis Island continued to thrive as a port of entry, ice and the First World War impacted immigration volumes in Philadelphia.
“There was a lot to that mystique of having every immigrant come through Ellis Island to see the Statue of Liberty and the country wanted a more centralized location for immigrants to come in to help to have more structure around that,” Flynn said.
The trip from Europe to Philly was 200 miles longer than getting to New York, according to Miller, and the Delaware River waters often froze.
Four years before the war broke out, Philly was “the third most important immigrant port in the country,” according to Miller. But at the peak of immigration from southern and eastern Europe, WWI came barging through.
The city saw 248,223 arrivals in Philadelphia between 1910 and 1914, but only about 56,000 in the entire next decade.
With such declining numbers, the Washington Avenue Immigration Station closed in 1915.
By 1923, only one line to Philadelphia by the American Line company, a prominent steamship operator, carried a sizable amount of immigrants, according to Miller.
“The restrictive immigration quotas implemented the next year ended even that activity, reducing the booming immigration of only ten years earlier to nothing more than a memory,” Miller wrote.
The Independence Seaport Museum tried to keep this part of history alive with an exhibition on the Washington Avenue Station when it moved by the Delaware River in 1995. But, the exhibition shut down during the pandemic, and there are no plans for bringing it back in the near future.
Still, for many Philadelphians in the area, “you have some connection” to the Washington Avenue Station, Flynn said.