Big Apple History . Coming to America . Looking Back


	Children's roof playground at Ellis Island

Interviewed late in life, Tessie Croce remembered the day she came to the United States from Italy as if it were yesterday, though she was only 15-years-old at the time. After weeks in third-class steerage, she arrived at Ellis Island with her mother, her aunt, and her grandmother.

"Awful. I wouldn't go back for anything in the world . . . So many people! Oh my God! It looked like cattle all over the place. We waited for the medical examination . . . If your eyes were red or something like that, they sent you back."

As an 18-year-old from the village of Paese Gombolo, Italy, Pierina Gasperetti came alone to Ellis Island in 1912. She recalls the confusion that greeted her:

"It was pretty strange for me, with all those people, always those big groups of people . . . [The officials] asked me a lot of questions: Where do you come from? So I told them, 'I come from here and there' . . . They wanted to know all sorts of things: Why did you come to America, how much money did we have? ... They were probably afraid that I couldn't even buy myself a piece of bread."

Illustration: Photo by Jacob Riis, courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York.