800
Opinion of the Court
In fact, the full record reveals not merely one understanding on the part of some United States officials about the Island's sovereignty, but three different understandings on this point, inconsistent with each other and inconstant over time.
First, there is some evidence that officials of the United States may have thought the entire Island was in New York. At various times from 1903 to 1925 the Commissioner of Immigration on Ellis Island used New York wages as a benchmark to show the need to raise the wages of federal workers on the Island. And although federal specifications governed construction projects on the Island, federal inspectors are known to have alluded to New York building codes as if they had been bases for relevant comparisons; a federal inspector would occasionally remark that if a particular building were subject to New York regulations, it would have to be condemned, and once, in 1935, when an official in the Public Works Branch of the Procurement Division recommended accepting a contractor's request to use a particular kind of bolt, the official noted that his New York counterparts had allowed the bolt to be used.21 References to New York regulations as benchmarks do not, then, necessarily indicate that federal officials actually thought the filled land was part of New York.
After the passage of the Davis-Bacon Act, 46 Stat. 1494, however, comes less equivocal evidence of understanding. As originally enacted, this statute provided that workers on "any public buildings of the United States" be paid at a rate "not less than the prevailing rate of wages for work of a similar nature in the city, town, village, or other civil division of the State in which the public buildings are located," ibid.,
21 In 1905, a contract for work on the Island required that the work "must be of the best quality and in strict accordance with the present rules and regulations of the Department of Water Supply, Gas and Electricity, New York, N. Y." N. Y. Exh. 638, p. 47. This is the only contract on record where contractors were required to follow New York regulations as if they were binding.
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