http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/25/arts/design/jr-brings-ellis-islands-abandoned-hospital-to-life.html 2014-09-24 19:23:49 JR Brings Ellis Island’s Abandoned Hospital to Life The French artist JR has installed century-old photographs in an abandoned building on the island. === In the century-old photo,  seven children gaze straight at the camera, looking hopeful or somber, or perhaps simply stunned at their surroundings. They have just landed on Ellis Island. Their heads were wrapped in white cloth; they suffered from favus, a scalp disease. Deemed unfit for entry into the United States, they were sent to the island’s enormous hospital, where they were studied, treated and photographed. Most likely, they were eventually released, healthy, to their new homeland. Their experience might have been forgotten, the photo lost with countless others in an archive. Instead, this black-and-white portrait has been revived, blown up to life-size and pasted across a broken window in the former Ellis Island Immigrant Hospital in New York harbor. Light streams through the children’s translucent faces, foliage visible beyond the crumbling building, which has been abandoned and off limits since 1954. The image is part of JR gave a preview tour last week, wearing his trademark sunglasses and striding the hospital’s long, spooky hallways, past flaking walls and dirt floors. Best known for his large-scale street “The idea is to respect the architecture,” JR said, moving past a wheat-pasted tableau where a woman’s hat hovers amid tree limbs seen through a broken window. “I let the walls decide what part of the image should appear.” The installation is site-specific. Doctors float over the broken white tiles of the surgical theater; a young woman seems to rest on the one remaining wiry bed frame; nurses laugh across the lockers in a linen storage room. For Janis Calella, president of The first tour groups will be limited to 10 people as part of a pilot program, with plans to expand next year. But the work will remain up “until it decides to disappear,” Ms. Calella said. Nature has already transformed some of the images: On the ancient lockers, rust seeps through the white uniforms of the nurses; people in a group of immigrant detainees appear nervous in a decayed room open to the lapping river. Some images are startling in their verisimilitude. Family members gaze at the Statue of Liberty, just as they did in the original moment. And some are creepy, like the ghostly girl scowling in a pointy hat, her dress flowing off a door into dust and debris. Though organizers kept this two-year-old project quiet, JR documented the installation process on his highly followed Instagram Ms. Calella had spent years saying no to artists and others who wanted entree to the hospital. But JR’s vision — to use Ellis Island photos in the public domain to re-enact history — and his reputation, as a multidisciplinary artist who bridges pop and The Ellis Island hospital opened in 1902, in a grand building on the southern half of the island, across from the Registry Room, where newcomers were processed. Doctors took but a few seconds to determine if foreigners were healthy enough to enter. Some were sent back, but others were directed to the hospital, which eventually had 750 beds across several buildings and was considered a paragon of public health management. It also had a contagious disease wing and isolation rooms, a “psychopathic” ward, a laboratory and a morgue. Autopsies were sometimes attended by European physicians, according to “Forgotten Ellis Island,” the The hospital treated measles and scarlet fever, along with rarer diseases, and even employed female doctors in the early 1900s. About 1.2 million people — around 1 percent of Ellis Island arrivals — passed through its doors. Some 350 babies were born there, and 3,500 people died, before the immigrant hospital was gradually shuttered by the 1930s. The space was later used by the Coast Guard and as a military detention center, but in 1954, the 29 hospital buildings were abandoned as they stood — with furniture, medical equipment and other artifacts intact. Today, some rooms look like beautiful industrial-age ruins, littered with leaves and shattered glass, and others somehow remain pristine, with even decades-old light bulbs still hanging. “You go from one room to another, and the energy would change,” JR said. After many attempts to find a fitting piece for it, he left the morgue untouched. JR was introduced to the building by a book, “ “It’s a really powerful place,” said Mr. Wilkes, who photographed it from 1998 to 2003, and is now on the board of Save Ellis Island. He was particularly moved by the realization that some patients could see the Statue of Liberty from their sickbeds. “She’s so close, and for many people who came to America and who never got out of that hospital, they never got to see any more than that,” Mr. Wilkes said. Their emotion lingered. “I would feel almost human energy in these empty rooms,” he said. JR is not a believer in ghosts, or at least he wasn’t before this project. “It is a perfect situation for a stuck soul,” he said. “I was really anxious before my first pasting,” he continued, thinking of the souls who “might encounter their own image.”