Forgotten Doors: The Other Ports of Entry to the United States

by M. Mark Stolarik (Editor)

This collection concentrates on the story of immigration through ports of entry to the United States other than Ellis Island, including Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Miami, New Orleans, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. The ethnic development of these cities is described.

207 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1988

Reviews

[Ron · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very interesting collection of essays regarding the "other" ports of entry to the U.S. New York/Ellis Island get all the press, but there were many other ports where immigrants arrived: Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore on the East Coast, Miami and New Orleans in the South, and San Francisco and Los Angeles in the West. The quality and emphasis of the essays vary, some get a little too mired in statistics (ethnic percentages of Baltimore's immigrants), some make the same claims repetitively ("LA is the Ellis Island of the late twentieth century"), but overall, an interesting, and indeed forgotten part of our history. I was interested to learn, for example, that most of the immigrants to my native Philadelphia did not arrive in the port there, but through New York, with Europeans arriving in Philadelphia typically moving on through to the hinterlands of Pennsylvania, Ohio and beyond. New Orleans as an anomolous "Catholic" city, with more lax attitude towards assimilation and with a congealing religion that crossed several nationalities/countries (Irish, Haitian, French, German, Italian) is also interesting in its difference. Los Angeles, as the inheritor of the immigrant capital crown, is a cypher, for as much as New York's similar role was distilled into the viscerally comprehensible Ellis Island, LA, much like its amorphous overall nature, has no there there, though the evidence of the mass immigration there is to be found everywhere: in the stores, churches, markets, gangs, schools, clubs, etc.