Pier 21: Gateway of Hope

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

Pier 21 is about a time when immigrants were not only welcomed with open
arms on Canada’s East coast, they were actually recruited in their
home countries by the Canadian government to fill up Canada’s huge,
unsettled interior. For the first 70 years of the 20th century,
steamships regularly crossed the Atlantic Ocean carrying hundreds—even
thousands—of immigrants daily to the shores of Halifax. This book, by
award-winning author Linda Granfield, explores Pier 21, a massive
government facility that opened in Halifax in 1928 to cope with large
numbers of immigrants. Before it closed in 1971, more than a million New
Canadians would pass through its doors.

The text on each page of the book is anchored around one or more
fascinating photographs from the National Archives of Canada. Granfield
uses the photos and her elegant prose to explain why so many people came
to Canada, how they got here, and what happened after they arrived.
There are photos of huge ships nudging up to Pier 21’s dock, their
decks crammed with immigrants. The most haunting photos, however, are
the portraits of nameless families, often in arcane Old World clothing,
standing for the camera with mixed expressions of fear and hope. Pier 21
is a timely reminder that Canada is, above all else, a nation of ethnic
diversity. Highly recommended.