View No.3: Ellis Island

Watercolor on Linen / 14“ X 20”

On the second day, Native Americans once again approached “to sell a great store of very good oysters.” They then passed an underwater shoal where a new immigration station was built in 1886 to replace Castle Clinton, an earlier facility at the tip of Manhattan. It processed up to one million immigrants a year and today, one in every four Americans is able to trace an ancestor who passed through this facility. After 50 years it was closed and reopened in 1990 as Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration.

This painting also depicts another much-loved floating icon, the Sloop Clearwater. It was built in 1969 at the instigation of folk music legend Pete Seeger who led a movement to focus attention on cleaning up the river using the sloop as a symbol.