The museum will be housed in three brick warehouses between the River Scheldt and Rijnkaai (Rhine Quay), where from 1873 to 1934 Red Star Line ships left with around 2.7 million emigrants to Canada and the US.
Major Dockside Projects
The architectural firm chosen for the museum is New York’s Beyer Binder Belle, the same company that re-created the atmospheric immigrants hall on Ellis Island. The building will have an observation tower with a 360-degree view across the city and over the riverbank where emigrants took their last steps in Europe.
The museum is one of three showcase projects in Antwerp’s old docklands, which are being redeveloped on the north side of the city. The first project, completed in May 2011, is MAS (Museum aan der Stroom/Museum on the Stream), a building of 10 box-shaped levels, with different museum displays on each floor, by Rotterdam architects Neutelings Riedi. The last project will be a diamond-shaped Port House building (Antwerp being the world’s main diamond cutting centre) by the British architect, Zaha Hadid.
American Ocean Liners
The Red Star Line was run by SANBA (Société Anonyme de Navigation Belgo-Americaine), a wholly owned subsidiary of America’s National Navigation Company. By setting up the company in Belgium, the American owners got around labour laws, and the ships sailed under Belgian flags. Antwerp was not the busiest point of departure for European emigrants – that distinction belonged to the German ports of Hamburg and Bremen, where a museum of emigration opened in 2006. (Maps of Europe issued by the Red Star Line to entice passengers deliberately failed to include the German ports.)
Antwerp today is Europe’s second largest port, after Rotterdam. It was built up in those days of high emigration by good rail links to the interior of Europe. At its busiest, two Red Star ships left the Rijnkaai a week, carrying up to 1,500 people each. Among its passengers in the mid 1930s were the scientist Albert Einstein and the composer Irving Berlin. Waves of Jews escaping Nazi Germany came half a century after an earlier wave when they had been driven from Russia. Over that period there were also around 150,000 Belgian emigrants, who settled mainly around the Great Lakes in the US and Canada.
Two Weeks of Sea-borne Discomfort
Exhibits already gathered for the museum include paintings, photographs, posters, brochures, memorabilia and items from the ships. Pride and joy of the fleet was the 27,000-ton Belgenland II. A cutaway model shows what life on board was like, and the cramped arrangements that had to be endured for the two-week voyage. “Although both Belgian and American regulations existed with regard to such accommodation,” explains a brochure to the museum, “inspection on it left much to be desired in practice.”
In June 28 2010, the American ambassador in Belgium, Howard Gutman, officially launched the dockside project. In his speech, reported on the museum’s website, he declared: “Columbus discovered America, Red Star Line helped to build it.”
The Red Star Line/People on the Move Museum is due to open in 2012.
See also Plantin, a Typeface and Master Printer in Antwerp
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