Cite as: 523 U. S. 767 (1998)
Opinion of the Court
and there is evidence that from 1931 to 1934 construction contracts for work on filled portions of the Island provided that wages for the City of New York applied.22 The National Government also treated Ellis Island as part of New York in the 1900, 1910, 1920, and 1940 national censuses, and throughout the prescription period various officials referred to "Ellis Island, New York," in correspondence.23
But the National Government was nothing if not pluralistic in its views on the matter. In 1900, when the Government requested proposals for a kitchen and restaurant building on the Island, its announcement stated that "Ellis Island is not under the jurisdiction of the State or City of New York. The New York City and State Building Laws and
22 New York also presented evidence that in 1934 New York processed two workmen compensation claims for injuries sustained on filled land; it was not until 1936, however, that Congress permitted the application of state law to federal workmen's compensation claims. See Murray v. Joe Gerrick & Co., 291 U. S. 315 (1934). Nor is it clear from the record that the processing of these claims actually involved the application of New York law; the processing may be explained simply by the fact that the contractor for whom the victims worked was located in New York.
23 In United States ex rel. Belardi v. Day, 50 F. 2d 816, 817 (1931), the Third Circuit held that Ellis Island was within the territorial jurisdiction of the District Courts of the Eastern and Southern Districts of New York. The court explained that "[w]hen [the Island] was property of New York it was within one or another of the counties of that state or within the waters thereof," and the former 28 U. S. C. § 178 (now 28 U. S. C. § 112) places the waters of the New York counties within the concurrent jurisdiction of the Southern and Eastern Districts. The court held that even though the 1834 Compact placed the Island on New Jersey's side of the boundary, "[t]he running of a boundary line in 1834 through the waters dividing the states of New York and New Jersey cannot disturb the statutory designation of jurisdiction in 1910." 50 F. 2d, at 817. Thus, the Third Circuit simply read the jurisdictional statute as placing any location within the waters subject to New York jurisdiction (as, under the Compact, the harbor waters were, for police purposes, even on the New Jersey side of the line) within the concurrent jurisdiction of the two named federal districts. The Third Circuit explicitly avoided determining anything about state sovereignty over the Island.
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