Commonwealth Pier as a Joint Landing Stage

Commonwealth Pier, Boston

Postcard image of Commonwealth Pier, Boston, Massachusetts

Of equal importance to the transfer of freight between land and water carriers is the provision made for the transfer of passengers.

There are several reasons why Boston should pay particular attention to this matter. Passengers are much more sensitive than freight to every inconvenience experienced in a transfer.

Boston's advantage in its situation near Europe is neutralized, so far as westbound freight is concerned, by the action of differential (lower) inland rates accorded to Baltimore, Philadelphia, Newport News, Portland, St. John and Montreal.

The most substantial effort must be made to provide steamship lines at Boston with passenger earnings to compensate them for the lower freight earnings, which the inland differentials impose.

Finally, it is possible here, as perhaps nowhere else on the North Atlantic coast, to provide for the direct interchange of passengers, at least steerage passengers, between cars and vessels. This, however, is not the method at present followed.

Handling the Immigrant Trade

At present, every Boston transatlantic pier handling a passenger steamer has its own layout, where immigrants may be examined and admitted to the country. If rejected or detained for further examination, they are sent to the present inadequate detention station on the end of Long Wharf.

If there are enough admitted immigrants destined to points west of the Hudson River to justify making up a passenger train at the steamer pier, such a train is made up. However, it is not always that this occurs. Half the time the westbound immigrants, like those for New England, are carted to the railroad stations and there put into their cars.

Similarly, through trains are run from the west to a steamer pier when there are enough westbound third-class passengers are sailing by a Boston steamer to justify a special train.

This has occurred, however, only in connection with Christmas sailings, particularly those of the Cunard Line, for which trains of Scandinavian third-class passengers are run from the northwest.

Most third-class travelers destined for Boston sailings come into Boston passenger stations on the regular Boston trains and find their own way to the piers.

The Situation in New York

It is instructive to compare this situation with that of New York. In New York, no immigrants are examined at the steamer pier. Every steamship loads its immigrants into barges which carry them to Ellis Island, the United States Immigration Station.

It is thus a joint immigration station for all lines. Eight trunk lines are operating west from Jersey City, — the Pennsylvania, West Shore, Delaware, Lackawanna & Western, Lehigh Valley, Erie, Ontario & Western, Baltimore & Ohio, Jersey Central.

Successively, each of these roads is assigned a day on which it has the transportation of all westbound immigrants from Ellis Island. As fast as a group of immigrants is examined and admitted, they are taken to the common railroad waiting room at Ellis Island, where they exchange their railroad orders for railroad tickets.

Then, as soon as a barge load of them has accumulated, they are floated up to the Jersey City terminal of the road of the day.[1] By evening enough immigrants have been brought to the Jersey railroad station to make up one or more direct immigrant trains.

A daily special immigrant train to the west is made possible by the concentration upon that train of all westbound immigrants arriving in New York that day.

This convenience and economy in the handling of immigrants is, of course, a by-product of the establishment of the Immigration Station at Ellis Island; it is not the object which Ellis Island was designed to serve.

Ellis Island was built to concentrate at one point the handling of all New York immigrants. They are brought to the immigration officers. The latter do not, as in Boston and Philadelphia, disperse themselves over all passenger steamship piers in the port and examine the immigrants where the vessels dock.

Immigrant Stations

It is realized that as the immigrant business of Philadelphia and Boston grows, it will be necessary to have an immigration station at each of these ports, where will be concentrated the examination and detention of all immigrants.

Such stations are now slowly underway. The Ellis Island station consists of four parts, — offices, examination quarters, detention quarters and hospital quarters. Hospital quarters are not planned for the Boston or Philadelphia stations, which will continue to send cases of sickness to city hospitals.

At Philadelphia $100,000 has been spent by the government in acquiring a site for an immigration station. This sum bought an estate, including a house, in Gloucester, N. J. The residence is used as an administration building.

One hundred thousand dollars more has been spent on the construction of a detention station; $100,000 more has gone to construct a wharf which will contain examination rooms for immigrants, who must all be barged there by the steamship companies.

An appropriation of $55,000 is still unspent; $23,000 more is asked of the present Congress. This $88,000 will suffice to shed the immigrant wharf. There is no current intention of applying for a government appropriation for the construction of a hospital.

It is likely that within two years the Philadelphia Immigration Station will be in complete operation. It is many years since the first active steps were taken towards its building.

In the meantime, no constructive step has been taken at Boston. For $30,000 a site was acquired at East Boston. Local interests were not satisfied with this location, so the government was persuaded to exchange it for another site, paying about $35,000 additional therefor.

Boston Immigrant Station

Plans were approved by the Treasury Department for the construction of an immigration station on the site chosen, on a total appropriation of $250,000 secured from Congress.
It was then discovered that the appropriation was insufficient to carry out the plans. Massachusetts congressmen are now asking an additional appropriation, bringing the total up to $375,000.

Judging from the many years it took to get the new Philadelphia immigration quarters, whose completion is still probably two years away, viewing the method in which the rebuilding of the Boston Customs House is proceeding, and recalling the manner in which government contracts are usually carried out, it is not easy to imagine an early completion of the needed Boston Immigration Station.

It is suggested that such an immigration station be fitted up for the United States government on a part of the second floor of Commonwealth Pier. There are three second-floor spaces, — the second floors of the middle and the two outer sheds.

A viaduct connects the second floor of the middle shed with Summer Street, which crosses the South Boston freight yards at an elevation.

This middle shed has been fitted up with accommodations for the customs examination of first and second class passengers, and with large examination rooms for the third-class passengers. These examination rooms are large enough to take care of all immigrant passengers arriving in Boston.

The Boston Immigration Station should consist of office rooms, detention quarters and examination quarters. Whether now proposed by the Boston immigration authorities or not, centralized examination of all immigrants will be necessary as soon as the Boston immigrant movement advances materially beyond its present proportions.

The Philadelphia station recognizes this necessity and provides for it in its immigration station; the Boston station should do the same. Examination rooms already exist at. Commonwealth Pier. It would be a simple matter to fit up offices and detention rooms on a part of the second floor of one of the outer sheds. The immigrants detained would pass from the examination rooms directly across a bridge to the detention station.

The fact that the sheds are separate provides for complete isolation of detention quarters from the rest of the pier. No sick cases will ever be harbored in these detention quarters. It is well known that the third class examination rooms are separated from the accommodations for first and second class passengers.

The latter would have no cause to know that there was a detention station on one of the other sheds of the pier; and not the slightest reason to fear it if they did know.

Fitting up offices and detention quarters to please the immigration service would involve only the laying of floors and partitions, perhaps the provision of extra windows, and an extension of the present water and lighting connections and heating plant serving the second floor of the middle shed.

It was once proposed that an immigration station should be constructed for the government on the second floor of the Leyland Line Pier at East Boston. The proposition failed because of the unwillingness of the government to lease such quarters from a private railroad company. No such difficulty would arise in devising a proper form of co-operation between the State of Massachusetts and the Federal government.

There would be several desirable results of such an arrangement. The government would be provided with spacious quarters, all on one floor, far more convenient to operate than quarters that can be constructed on the very narrow piece of land acquired by East Boston. The situation in South Boston is one much more accessible to the immigration officials.

Within a few months, these quarters at South Boston can be provided. The immigration station should largely reduce the present heavy expense entailed by a dispersed immigration service. The saving, instead of beginning five or ten years from now, could start at once.

The Port Directors would receive a substantial additional revenue from Commonwealth Pier. The large space on present piers now occupied by this multiplicity of examination and waiting rooms would become available for freight or storage purposes.

Assuming that conditions existing before the war will be resumed when it is over, three of the principal immigrant lines in the port will then be berthed at Commonwealth Pier, — the Hamburg-American, the White Star-Liverpool, and the White Star-Mediterranean services.
No other one location for an immigrant station will serve directly so many landing immigrants as a location on Commonwealth Pier.

Accessibility to Trains for Direct Loading of Immigrants

Consolidate there the immigrants from other lines and they are in the most accessible location in the port of Boston, both with regard to the direct loading of immigrant trains for the west and concerning carting the immigrants to the Boston railroad stations.

Immigrants destined for New England will continue to be so handled. The location chosen at East Boston is not one which can have direct railroad connection, for it is east of the Boston, Revere Beach & Lynn Railroad.

From the Commonwealth Pier, the New England immigrants would he carted over the viaduct to Summer Street and so to South or North Station.

The westbound immigrants would descend the stairs to the train waiting on the first floor of the middle shed. Though there might not every day be enough immigrants to form a westbound train, one could be made up very frequently, especially in the summer months, when the tide of immigration is running heavy.

The New Haven, Boston & Albany and Boston & Maine could alternate in running trains to the west. This is what they have already been doing in the case of the Hamburg America Line; each road has assigned to it every third boat, and, for that ship, runs a through train to the west.

Philadelphia has made the great mistake of marooning its immigration station three miles down the Delaware River, on the New Jersey side. Immigrants must be barged down there and then barged back again, in order to get to the railroad stations and be on their way to the interior.

The immigrant appreciates convenience just as anyone else does. He writes back home of the comfort with which he is at Boston transferred from vessel to car.

Later, when returning home for the winter, he sails from Boston. When he buys prepaid tickets for "the family left on the other side, he buys them on a steamer sailing to Boston.

No one thing can do more to interest steamship lines in this port than to make it attractive to third-class travelers. The money in the North Atlantic trade is made in carrying immigrants.

There is at the outer end of Commonwealth Pier a berth 400 feet long, available for the use of any steamship that may want to land its passengers there. All Boston transatlantic passenger lines not berthing at Commonwealth Pier should be invited to stop at this end berth for the hour necessary to land or take on passengers of all classes, and mails, in and outbound.

The berth would thus serve as a union passenger station, or landing stage, such as the Prince's Landing Stage at Liverpool or the Landing Stage at Tilbury Docks, London, each used jointly by all steamship lines.

Advantages of Using the Commonwealth Pier

There are reasons why the Boston lines not now using Commonwealth Pier might be glad to take advantage of such an offer. The berth is so situated that it could be reached with case and with no danger, involving only a slight change in the vessel's course, inward or outward.

To stop there, inbound would save the vessel the cost of barging or carting immigrants to the immigration station at Commonwealth Pier, and save the immigrants the inconvenience of being so transferred.

The steamship line would have thrown open to it the splendid, accessible first and second class passenger accommodations of Commonwealth Pier.

If all Boston lines will agree to use this as a passenger terminal, then, in the joint advertising which should be undertaken, the most straightforward directions can be issued for prospective travelers, for all would sail to or from Commonwealth Pier.

A landing stage, such as this pier will be, would be an attraction towards Boston whose effect would be countrywide. It does not seem impracticable for even the Cunard boats to make the call. Inbound, these boats must turn at right angles before entering their berth at East Boston.

It would seem to be little more challenging to make this turn after lying for an hour along the end of Commonwealth Pier than to make it upon entering directly from the sea.

In the crowded waters of the Hudson River at New York, with its heavy currents, steamers of 10,000 to 11,000 tons, like the "Creole" of the Southern Pacific's New Orleans service, and the "Cristobal" of the Panama Canal Steamship Company, use different piers for inward and outward cargo.

In either case, the shift involves taking these vessels out into the Hudson Paver and towing them to the outward pier. The " Cristobal," 11,000 tons, discharges at Pier 52 and proceeds to Pier 67 to load. It would not seem an insuperable difficulty to move a vessel of any size across the quiet waters of Boston harbor.

Before the war, the Hamburg America Line announced that when the number of passengers justified so doing it would run a Pullman from Chicago and one on the midnight train from New York, to be switched at Boston to Commonwealth Pier and connect with the Hamburg-American sailings.

The Boston & Albany and New Haven roads are perfectly willing to put on a Pullman either eastbound or westbound, at any time, if a minimum number of passengers present themselves.

If all lines were using Commonwealth Pier, it would be simple to arrange to have all first and second class passengers from New York or the west, sailing from Boston on a single day, given the opportunity of using Pullmans run from New York and the west to the ship's side on that day.

That is, there would be Port of Boston Pullmans run on the important sailing days of the year. It is not impossible that the plan would work so well that the steamship lines would arrange to have their sailings more frequently fall on the same day.

Similarly westbound; by wireless, the first and second class passengers on all lines arriving on a given day could be notified of the opportunity of taking Pullmans for New York and the west.at the ship's side.

At the pier, they would find awaiting them enough cars to accommodate them. These cars would be switched to South Station during the evening and would be put on the Boston & Albany evening train for the west, or the New Haven's midnight train for New York.

A first-class restaurant upon the pier would be necessary to the success of this plan, but one is sure to be provided if the passenger business of the port is consolidated there, to serve travelers and their friends.

The convenience of such arrangements can be understood by anyone who has traveled abroad and has debarked at Liverpool. Tilbury, Southampton, Cuxhaven or Bremerhaven, directly into a train for the interior.

The convenience would appeal mainly to elderly persons, women traveling alone or persons traveling with families. For all these people, in addition to the comfort offered them, there would be the not inconsiderable saving of the cost of being transferred from the railroad station to ship.

Manhattan, located across the river from the railroads, can never have such facilities for connection between passenger car and ship. For first and second class travelers, this connection is now made in this country only by the Canadian Pacific Railroad at Quebec, where the Canadian Pacific trains, one of them a transcontinental, meet the "Empress" steamers of the Canadian Pacific's Liverpool service.

“Section VI: Commonwealth Pier As A Joint Landing.” In Report of the Directors of the Port of Boston, Year Ending November 30, 1914, Public Document No. 9, Boston: Wright & Potter Printing Co., 1915, Pages 51-58.

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