Castle Clinton's Three Lives

The round sandstone fort just ahead, sitting at the tip of Battery Park, was built to fire cannons at invading ships, but it never fired a shot in anger, and that failure turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to it.

Construction finished in eighteen eleven, as the United States braced for war with Britain. The fort carried twenty eight heavy cannons and sat just offshore on its own small island, connected to Manhattan by a causeway. The war came and went without a single battle fought from its walls, and in eighteen fifteen it was renamed Fort Clinton, after the mayor, DeWitt Clinton.

With no war left to fight, the city turned the fort into entertainment. Renamed Castle Garden, it became one of the most fashionable gathering spots in New York, a roofed amphitheater that could hold several thousand people. In September of eighteen fifty, the Swedish singer Jenny Lind made her American debut on its stage. Advance publicity had already turned her into a celebrity before she set foot in the country, and the press coined the term Lind mania to describe the frenzy that followed her, with tickets for her shows in such demand they were sold at auction.

Its biggest role came next. From eighteen fifty five until it closed in eighteen ninety, Castle Garden served as the nation's first official immigrant landing depot, the very first stop in America for an estimated eight million immigrants arriving by ship. Long before anyone was processed at Ellis Island, this was where new arrivals were counted, questioned, and let loose into the city.

After immigration moved to Ellis Island, the building became home to the New York Aquarium for more than four decades, then sat empty until preservationists saved it as a national monument. Today it serves as the ticket office for ferries to the Statue of Liberty, a small stone building that has been a fort, an opera house, an immigration gate, and an aquarium, all on the same patch of ground.