This 3-hour guided tour runs daily and it includes entrance fees, a professional art historian guide and private and small group tour options. The tour begins at Battery Park, one of the oldest parts of Manhattan. Here you’ll find the country’s first immigration center, Castle Garden Immigration Station, which operated until Ellis Island opened. Take a ferry to visit Liberty Island where the Statue of Liberty keeps an eye on incoming ships. Visit the statue at your own pass. Before, you will learn all about Fort Wood, which now acts as the base for the statue, offered to the US by France in 1886. Hear all about its creator, Bartholdi, as well as contributions by famed architect Gustave Eiffel, of Tower fame. Another ferry will whisk you across the water to Ellis Island. Here, millions of European newcomers wandered the very luggage rooms and registry rooms that you will enter, learning about the medical examines and surprising conditions faced by immigrants. Feel the fear at the separation stairs or the elation at the kissing post where families’ lives changed forever. You’ll end your tour at the Wall of Honor, where you can search for your family’s name among the some 700,000 names commemorating those who entered the United States here. This tour is the ideal way to remember, and celebrate, the immigrants that contributed so much to America’s success.