Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration

What it is

Ellis Island was the first and largest federal immigrant inspection station, and the National Park Service records that over twelve million future Americans passed through it between its opening on 1 January 1892 and its abandonment in 1954. The first person processed was Annie Moore, a seventeen-year-old from County Cork. Before Ellis Island, inspection was a state responsibility handled at Castle Garden in Battery Park, the fort known today as Castle Clinton, from which the ferry now leaves. The building visitors enter is not the 1892 one: the Main Immigration Building on the site opened in 1900, and most of the twelve million came through it. The island itself grew from an uninhabited sand bank of 3.3 acres to a 27.5-acre complex of brick and stone. After 1954 the depot stood empty and rotted for three decades. A presidential proclamation brought it into the Statue of Liberty National Monument in 1965, and the restored Main Building reopened in 1990 as the country's principal museum devoted entirely to immigration. One curiosity of the place: since a 1998 Supreme Court ruling the island sits in the jurisdiction of both states, with the Main Building inside New York and the later landfill mostly inside New Jersey, all of it federal ground.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

What's inside

Three floors of exhibits fill the Main Building, and the route through them is roughly chronological if taken from the bottom up. The first floor is entered through the Baggage Room, where immigrants once checked the luggage many of them refused to let go of; it now holds century-old cases, the World Migration Globe, the two Journeys galleries covering 1550 to 1890 and 1945 to the present, the information desk, the audio-tour counter, the bookstore, the gift shop and the Ellis Island Café. Behind the building, outdoors, are the American Immigrant Wall of Honor and the remnants of Fort Gibson. The second floor is the one people come for: the Registry Room, or Great Hall, restored to its 1918 to 1924 appearance with several original wooden benches, the Hearing Room restored to about 1911, and the exhibits Through America's Gate and Peak Immigration Years 1880 to 1924. The third floor holds the Bob Hope Memorial Library, a recreated dormitory room restored to 1908, Ellis Island Chronicles with its five scale models of the island, Treasures From Home, Silent Voices on the years of abandonment, and Restoring a Landmark. The American Family Immigration History Center, on the first floor, searches passenger manifests for the Port of New York from 1892 to 1924.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

How long to spend

The National Park Service answers this directly: generally, two to three hours is ample time to visit. This guide records 150 minutes, the middle of that published range, and that figure assumes the museum alone, with the ferry and the security queue counted separately. Two hours is enough to walk the Registry Room, the Hearing Room and one of the second-floor galleries properly, with the audio tour running. Three hours adds the third floor, where Ellis Island Chronicles and Treasures From Home reward the extra time and where most visitors never reach. Around that core, budget generously. Statue City Cruises states that a continuous trip taking in both islands runs about two hours in total, which is a briefer visit than the Park Service's own two-to-three-hour figure for Ellis alone, so treat the ferry operator's number as the minimum and the Park Service's as the realistic one. The queue for security screening can be an hour or more in summer, at weekends and over winter holidays. Ranger-guided walking tours add a further block, given as approximately forty minutes on the park's guided-tours page and as usually thirty-five minutes on its things-to-do page. Doing both Ellis and Liberty islands properly is most of a day, which is how the Park Service describes it.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Season and crowds

Ellis Island is open every day of the year except the fourth Thursday in November, Thanksgiving, and 25 December. What it is not is a place with fixed clock hours a visitor can rely on: access is entirely by ferry, and the Park Service now points visitors at the Statue City Cruises schedule rather than publishing its own opening and closing times. The timetable printed on the park's hours page is a 2023 boat schedule that has not been revised since 22 June 2023, so no current daily opening or closing time is recorded on this page. Check the schedule for the actual date of the visit. Two pieces of the park's own guidance survive that gap and are worth planning around. To see both islands with ample time, be on a ferry that departs The Battery or Liberty State Park before 1.00 p.m., and to see both in one day at all the Park Service recommends an early departure. Ellis Island begins closing thirty minutes before the last boat leaves it. Season matters more here than at an indoor museum, because the approach is across open water: harbour wind makes winter feel considerably colder than the city, and the island offers little shade in July heat.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Tickets

There is no entrance fee. The National Park Service charges nothing to enter either the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration or the Statue of Liberty Museum. What a visitor actually pays for is the ferry, because the islands cannot lawfully be reached any other way, and one ferry ticket covers both islands and both museums. On the park's published 2026 tariff an adult ticket of thirteen and over is $25.50, a child of four to twelve is $16.50, a child under four is free, and a senior of sixty-two and over is $22.50. That is the figure this page records as the price of admission, since it is the sum a visitor cannot avoid. The audio tour is included, and ranger-guided walking tours are free and need no ticket. The Hard Hat Tour of the south-side hospital complex costs an additional $50 and is limited to visitors aged thirteen and over. An America the Beautiful pass buys nothing here, and neither do the national fee-free days, because a ferry ticket is a transportation fee rather than an entrance fee. Tickets are sold by Statue City Cruises alone; the only authorised on-site window in New York is inside Castle Clinton.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Getting there

Every visitor arrives by the same ferry service, from one of two mainland points. In New York it is The Battery at the southern tip of Manhattan, GPS address 1 Battery Place; in New Jersey it is Liberty State Park in Jersey City, 1 Audrey Zapp Drive. The order of the stops differs by where you board: boats from New York call at Liberty Island first and Ellis Island second, boats from New Jersey call at Ellis first and Liberty second. Anyone whose main interest is Ellis Island should note that and consider the New Jersey side. No car is needed, and from Manhattan a car is a liability: the park states that no designated parking exists at The Battery and that the private lots along West Street and South Street are expensive. Take the 4 or 5 to Bowling Green, the R to Whitehall Street, the 1 to South Ferry, or the M5, M15 or M20 bus. Liberty State Park is the easier drive and its parking, charged, is cheaper and plentiful; by rail the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail stops there, but the walk from the station to the ferry is a flat 1.4 miles with no shuttle. Private boats may not dock at either island.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

What to watch out for

The museum is in the middle of a long rebuild. The Ellis Island Reimagined project is replacing more than 100,000 square feet of exhibits, and the park warns of noise, construction equipment, materials and personnel inside the Main Building, plus short-term closures of parts of exhibits. As of the park's July 2026 update the third-floor Changing Exhibit is closed; the first and second floors are open in full. The building itself stays open throughout. The second trap is the ticket time. The time printed on a ferry ticket is when to join the airport-style security queue on the mainland, not a departure time, and that queue runs to an hour or more in summer, at weekends and over winter holidays. Travel light, because there are no lockers at either screening facility and no storage on Ellis Island, so everything brought must be carried all day; bags have to fit an x-ray opening of 24.2 by 17.9 inches. Pets are barred from the ferries and the islands, service animals excepted. Wheelchairs can be borrowed free at the museum information desk, first come first served, on leaving photo identification. Mobile coverage on the island is unreliable, so agree a meeting point with your group before separating.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Photography

Photography inside the museum is ordinary visitor photography and the park publishes no restriction on it for Ellis Island; the tripod ban in the park's prohibited-items list applies to the Statue of Liberty pedestal, not to the Main Building. Two rules do bite before you arrive. Large photography bags, equipment cases, carts and dollies are prohibited at security screening unless they are part of a permitted activity, and every bag must pass an x-ray opening of 24.2 by 17.9 inches, so a full camera backpack is a risk and a single body with one lens is not. Drones are banned outright across the park. The picture most people come for is the Registry Room, and it is a hard room to shoot: enormous arched windows at either end, a vaulted ceiling and a mostly empty floor mean heavy contrast on a bright day. The balcony above it gives the elevated view along the hall and is the better vantage. Outside, the Wall of Honor and the Fort Gibson remnants sit behind the building. The classic exterior of the Main Building with its domed corner towers is best taken from the ferry deck on the approach rather than from the dock, where you are too close to fit it in.

Checked 2026-08-26

Where it is

Nearby

External links

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