A BRIEF HISTORY OF ANGEL ISLAND PART 2

Last month, we looked at the pre-history and early history of Angel Island. This month, I’ll bring it up to the 21^st century.

Starting in 1910, China Cove, at the northeast corner of the island, was used as an Immigration Station. Because of a weak economy in the 1870s, Asians, and Chinese workers in particular, were no longer welcome in the United States, even though they had been valued laborers in the decades before. When Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Acts in the early 1880s, the U. S. government needed a way to enforce the restrictions it had placed on the immigration of Chinese. The act was quite controversial at the time and the term ‘immigration station’ was a euphemism used to make the facility’s purpose more palatable to the public. In addition, its isolated location on Angel Island seemed ideal. Although the station was publicly called the Ellis Island of the West, internally it was called the Guardian of the Western Gate. This facility was intended to slow the entrance of Asians into the United States; in reality, it became a detention center.

More than 175,000 Chinese were processed through the Immigration Station: some within a few weeks, most within a few months. For some, the process took several years. Any immigrant who could prove she was the child of someone already a U.S. citizen was eligible for entry. Many carried falsified documents and these paper sons and daughters were interrogated about their home village and family history, in an effort to prove that there was reason to deny them entrance into the United States. A number of those waiting for their cases to be decided carved poems into the woodwork of the center. Some of this poetry is still visible today, and two detainees wrote down much more of it in the early 1930s. They discovered the historic poetry while waiting for their own cases to be resolved.

The Immigration Station was also used to process thousands of Japanese picture brides as well as immigrants from Korea, the Philippines and Russia. During World War I, enemy aliens (mostly German citizens) were held for a time before being transferred to a facility on the east coast. In 1940, the Immigration Service closed the station and turned it over to the U. S. Army. During World War II, the Army used the detention barracks to process both German and Japanese prisoners of war. After the war, the buildings were abandoned and the slow process of deterioration began. Once scheduled for demolition, the station is now re-opened after a $15 million phase I restoration with more to come.

In addition, during World War II, hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers were processed going to and from the Pacific Theater of the war. Angel Island was second to Camp Stoneman in Pittsburg for processing soldiers, and it was said by many soldiers that the food on Angel Island was the best the Army had to offer.

The advent of the Cold War added yet another level of fortification to Angel Island: Nike missiles. Three below-ground magazines were constructed on Point Blunt, the southern tip of the island. The radar and control facility for these missiles was built on the top of the island’s highest point, but only after it was bulldozed flat! Fortunately, the dirt was just pushed over the edge. Now that the missiles have been removed from Point Blunt, the top of the mountain has been restored and recontoured to resemble its original profile.

The first part of Angel Island to become a State Park was the area around Ayala Cove. That was in 1954, and more land was acquired in 1958, extending the park to the top of Mount Livermore. It was not until the removal of the Nike missiles in 1962 that almost the entire island became part of the state park system. The only exceptions are two U. S. Coast Guard-maintained navigation sites, one on Point Blunt and one on Point Stuart.

Today, you can hike, bike, and even camp overnight on Angel Island, enjoying the views and savoring its long and varied history.

Ray Wichmann, is a US SAILING-certified Ocean Passagemaking Instructor, a US SAILING Instructor Trainer, and a member of US SAILING’s National Faculty. He holds a 100-Ton Master’s License, was a charter skipper in Hawai’i for 15 years, and has sailed on both coasts of the United States, in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Greece. He is presently employed as the Master Instructor at OCSC Sailing in the Berkeley Marina.