Immigration

12727.

Views of Staten Island. No. 6. Quarantine Landing, Tompkinsville. 1799 saw the creation of a quarantine station for immigrants with yellow fever and smallpox. It was authorized to move from Bedloe (now Liberty) Island to Tompkinsville. Elizabeth Bayley Seton, the first American Roman Catholic Saint, assists her father, the New York City Health Officer, Dr. Richard Bayley. On September 1, 1858, fearing the spread of contagious disease a mob of Staten Islanders burn the Quarantine Hospital in Tompkinsville. The hospital served immigrants to the US who were thought to be too ill to enter the country. In 1870, Swinburne Island, a man-made island off of South Beach, is constructed as a Quarantine hospital for immigrants arriving in America with contagious diseases. It replaces the quarantine ships which had housed the sick immigrants since the burning of the Tompkinsville Quarantine Station in 1858. Originally named Dix Island, after a former New York Governor, the name was soon changed to Swinburne after the Civil War hero and surgeon who headed the development of the Island: John S. Swinburne. In 1873, Hoffman Island, a second man-made Quarantine Island, is completed off the shore of South Beach. Conditions on both quarantine islands were often overcrowded and unsanitary. In 1901 7,801 people were detained on Hoffman Island. Use of the hospitals declined until they were finally closed in the 1920s. From 1931 to 1937 the island was used as a bird quarantine station for imported parrots. The island is named for John T. Hoffman, a former New York City Mayor and New York State Governor.