A photo shows the damage in the hospital at Angel Island before the restoration work began. Photo credit: California State Parks
An aging hospital building on Angel Island, where a million immigrants were detained between 1910 and 1940, is getting a new life, after nearly reaching a state just short of total disrepair.
The hospital is a survivor of the era when the island served as a detention center for immigrants entering the U.S. from some 80 countries including Japan, China and Germany. But while the island’s old barracks have since been restored and used as an interpretive center hosting thousands of visitors, the hospital sat slowly decaying and listing toward ruin.“This building was a beautiful ruin before we were able to save it,” said Katherine Toy, director of the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation. “This building was very close to being lost forever.”
Toy’s group worked with California State Parks to raise the funds needed to restore the hospital, which over the years has consumed about $40 million. The restoration work is bringing the building back to its original condition at a time when it housed everything from deaths to births.
Toy recently walked through the building where rooms ranged from a state of raw wood slats to sleekly plastered and painted rooms in an austere white harkening back to its days as a medical facility.
The work is also restoring a pair of staircases that once served as segregated entrances for “Asians” and “non-Asians.” Toy said the restoration work uncovered one of the staircases that had since been boarded up. She said segregated entrances were only used for a couple years before the practice ended.
“Angel Island really represented a gate-keeping experience for immigration,” Toy said. “It was built to keep people out of the country really.”
The building’s architecture reflected a period of medical practice occasionally based on some dodgy theories. Toy pointed to the ceiling of a patients’ room where the ceiling’s corners were rounded off. The thinking of the time was that germs would get trapped in cornered ceiling — hence the curves. READ MORE