Pier 21: A History
Between 1928 and 1971, nearly one million immigrants landed in Canada at Pier 21 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. During those years, it was one of the main ocean immigration facilities in Canada, including when it welcomed home nearly 400,000 Canadians after service overseas during the Second World War. In the immediate postwar period, Pier 21 became the busiest ocean port of entry in the country.
Today, people across Canada still enjoy connections to Pier 21 through family history and stories of arrival at the site. Since 1998, researchers at the Pier 21 Interpretive Centre and now the Canadian Museum of Immigration have been conducting interviews, reviewing archival materials, gathering written stories, and acquiring photographs, documents, and other objects reflecting the history of Pier 21. Pier 21: A History builds upon the resulting collection. It presents a history of this important Canadian ocean immigration facility during its years of operation and later emergence as a site of public commemoration. Published in English. Also available in French: Quai 21: Une histoire.Earn by promoting books
Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.
Become an affiliate
Pier 21, which now houses the Canadian Museum of Immigration in Halifax, Nova Scotia, occupies a central place in the history of transatlantic movement into and out of eastern Canada in the twentieth century - including that of my own family. During the Second World War, my great-grandfather, William Carruthers, came to Halifax many times as a merchant mariner on the Atlantic convoys. I also ended up at Pier 21 decades later, although in the guise of a master's student in history studying with Colin Howell at Saint Mary's University. And so, it was with considerable enthusiasm that I opened Steven Schwinghamer and Jan Raska's detailed and evocative study; that I listened to the voices of those others who passed through as immigrants and provided testimony to the Museum as oral histories and written narratives from which the authors generously quote; that I passed several hours absorbing the dozens of remarkable photographs. For those images alone, this book is worth its cover price.
The authors succeed in telling a story which is at once eminently readable and engaging, brisk but scholarly - a narrative rooted in an ever-expanding literature on immigration, reception, and personal experience. Pier 21: A History is set over five chapters, which chart the facility's existence as 'a place of beginnings' (p. 1), from its official opening on 8 March 1928, to its closure in 1971, and its resurrection as a museum in the 1990s. Chapter 2 also adds the 'pre-history' of Pier 21, including the development of Halifax as a port of immigration in the late nineteenth century. Throughout, Schwinghamer and Raska discuss an array of topics ranging from the diversity of immigrants to Canada (they were not all Scottish at any stage), the contexts which prompted migration and how receptive Canadians proved to be, and (particularly in Chapter 1) what it was like to staff immigration terminals and conduct customs checks and medical examinations. Illustrative material adds a useful sense of the internal and external architectural development of the site.
This is, then, a fascinating book, which asserts the necessity of listening to the past and the importance of allowing testimony to guide the telling of history. It will be especially welcome as a souvenir of any visit to the museum, or a precursor of the whet-the-appetite variety. Academic readers will appreciate that this is an introduction to a theme, lay readers will doubtless not notice the scholarly paraphernalia. But if there is one last observation I have to make, it is this. That I am struck by how different landing in Nova Scotia is these days: to be greeted, in Halifax International Airport at least, by the visual cues of the province's tartanry and then by the waft of the Tim Horton's coffee stand in the terminal. Not so a young Jewish refugee from postwar Europe, who recalled 'the emptiness and ugliness of that long shed'. That, for hundreds of thousands of people, across five decades, was what stayed with them when they arrived at Pier 21.
