On 28 September 2013 the City of Antwerp opened a museum in three brick sheds on the Rijnkaai, the quay where the Red Star Line once checked, washed and examined its third-class passengers before they boarded for America. About two million people sailed with the company between 1873 and 1934. The museum tells their story in the building they passed through, and it keeps two objects most visitors come to see: the letter in which Albert Einstein resigned from the Prussian Academy of Sciences, written on Red Star Line paper, and Irving Berlin’s piano.

Its American counterpart is Ellis Island in New York, where many of the same passengers landed, and the two museums are twinned. The architects who restored the sheds had restored Ellis Island first.

A Belgian flag on an American line

The Red Star Line was an American idea with a Belgian passport. It was founded in 1871 as a joint venture between the International Navigation Company of Philadelphia, which also ran the American Line, and the Société Anonyme de Navigation Belgo-Américaine of Antwerp. The driving force on the American side was Clement Griscom, who had risen from clerk to partner at the Philadelphia trading house Peter Wright & Sons. He negotiated with King Leopold II and with the Belgian shipowners Jules-Bernard von der Becke and William Edouard Marsily, and he ran the line until 1902.

The Belgian half was the clever part. Sailing under the Belgian flag spared the company the cost of American crews, and the Antwerp subsidiary, in business from 19 September 1872, held the exclusive mail contract to Philadelphia and New York. For about 30 years it produced most of the group’s profits. The first liner, the Vaderland, reached Philadelphia on 18 February 1873. In 1882 alone the line carried about 40,000 passengers to Philadelphia, and between 1883 and 1889 it took an average of 25,000 steerage passengers a year to New York. Its ships also called at Liverpool and Southampton.

Every ship carried the same signature: a black funnel with a white band and a red five-pointed star, and a name that usually ended in “land”: Vaderland, Westernland, Noordland, Belgenland, Lapland, Kroonland. The Westernland of 1883 was one of the first steel steamships on the route between Antwerp and New York. Not every voyage ended well: the Rusland ran aground at Long Branch, New Jersey, on 19 March 1877 and was lost, and the second Vaderland, renamed Southland in 1915, was torpedoed in 1917 with the loss of four lives. In 1902 the International Mercantile Marine Company took the line over; it survived that group’s financial crisis in 1915, passed in the 1930s to the shipowner Arnold Bernstein, went bankrupt in 1934 and stopped trading in 1935. Holland America Line eventually bought what was left.

Who sailed

Most passengers were not Belgian. About one in ten was, according to the figures given at the opening; about a quarter were Jews, most of them from Eastern Europe, and the American magazine Tablet put the number of Jewish refugees and emigrants who left on the line at more than half a million. “None of the migration would have happened without the development of lines like Red Star,” the New York University historian Hasia Diner told Tablet.

Some names stand out. Israel Isidore Baline sailed in 1893 on the Rhynland, aged five, and became Irving Berlin; his piano, donated to the museum, stands near the end of the visit. His daughter Linda Emmet, who came to the opening, told of the scar on her father’s forehead, left when someone dropped a penknife on him during the crossing. Golda Meir and the American admiral Hyman Rickover also travelled on the line. Sonia Pressman Fuentes, later a lawyer and a co-founder of the National Organization for Women, left Berlin with her parents in 1933 at the age of five and crossed on the Westernland. “My family’s voyage saved our lives,” she told Tablet.

Albert Einstein was a regular passenger. In 1933, sailing back from New York on the Belgenland, he learned that the Nazis had ransacked his summer house. He did not go on to Germany. In Belgium he resigned from the Prussian Academy of Sciences on Red Star Line paper and gave up his German nationality, stayed for several months with friendly scientists and artists, and then sailed to America for good on the Westernland. He took the oath as an American citizen in 1940.

The sheds on the Rijnkaai

For its first two decades the line examined emigrants in the open, under hangars on the quay. After years of complaints it built, in 1894, a plain red-brick warehouse of about 400 square metres on the Rijnkaai as a control post for third-class passengers. It was still too small to check several hundred people in about an hour. A few years before the First World War the city added a large, high customs shed on the Montevideostraat, which the line probably used for baggage.

The biggest building came last. In 1922 the Red Star Line built a sober Art Deco block on the Rijnkaai with separate bathhouses for men and women, where clothes were disinfected while their owners showered. Third-class passengers were washed, examined by doctors and checked by clerks just before departure. The timing was not a coincidence: in 1921 the United States passed the Emergency Quota Act and began to close its doors, and controls tightened. The most elaborate departure hall was built just as fewer people were allowed to arrive.

The city bought the sheds in the early 1990s, and in 2001, after lobbying, they were protected as monuments. When the New York firm Beyer Blinder Belle started work, its partner in charge, Richard Southwick, found the buildings rotten, rusted and covered in graffiti. The firm, with its local partner 8 Office, the exhibition designer Christophe Gaeta and Tillett Lighting Design, turned them into about 3,100 square metres of museum and added a steel and glass observation tower shaped like a ship’s funnel, with an open-air view over the Scheldt.

It took about eleven years from the first plans to the opening and more than $20 million, with money from the Flemish government, Visit Flanders, the shipping group CMB, the Gosselin Group and other Flemish companies. “It is quite emotional for us to finally be in this building after so many years,” Philip Heylen, then the city’s deputy mayor for culture, said at the opening. During the planning he had found out that some of his own relatives had emigrated on the line.

From Warsaw to New York

The permanent exhibition follows the passengers rather than the ships. It begins at a travel agency in Warsaw and ends with the arrival in New York. In between it reconstructs the steps in the sheds: the disinfection of luggage, the document checks, the showers and the medical examination by doctors from New York, from Antwerp and from the company itself. There are ship models and archive photographs of life in steerage and in first class, drawings and paintings by the Antwerp artist Eugeen Van Mieghem (1875 to 1930), who sketched third-class passengers on their way to the sheds, and memorabilia from the collection of Robert Vervoort.

View this post on Instagram

The curator who built it, the historian Bram Beelaert, worked with the Ellis Island museum and with YIVO, the Institute for Jewish Research in New York, and a genealogist traced descendants of passengers. His problem was tone. “How do you evoke the hope, expectations, fear, disappointments in a credible way?” he asked Tablet. His answer was the people: the museum is built around travel stories collected from the relatives of passengers, and its collection of biographical migration heritage is still growing.

View this post on Instagram

The last room was renewed in 2018 for the museum’s fifth anniversary. It now tells what happened to families once they had arrived, including that of Ellen Bledsoe Rodriguez of Los Angeles, whose mother left Antwerp in the 1920s. That year a temporary exhibition put Antwerp’s own newcomers on the same footing, from Dutch and West Flemish arrivals to Syrian refugees. “That is not a political statement, we use a broad definition of migrant,” the director Karen Moeskops told VRT NWS. It was the right call: a museum in the sheds where Belgians queued to leave is well placed to remind Antwerp that it has stood at both ends of the queue.

The museum now

The formula works. By October 2016 the museum had received more than 450,000 visitors, 130,000 of them in the previous year, and it won the Flemish Culture Prize for movable heritage for 2015: €10,000 and a work by the sculptor Philip Aguirre, for what the jury called its exemplary operation and innovative approach. The Flemish government now classes it as a collecting institution of national importance and pays it an operating grant of €574,000 a year for 2024 to 2028. The agreement commits it to renewing the permanent exhibition before its 15th anniversary in 2028 and to developing a programme of reminiscence sessions for older people with a migration story.

The temporary shows return to the line’s own history from new angles. In 2024 A Welcome Refugee: Einstein & Red Star Line ran free of charge in the museum’s Depot from 19 April to 8 September, with the original Belgenland passenger list bearing Einstein’s name, photographs of him on the Rijnkaai by Germaine Van Parys, a photograph of him with James Ensor and an audio play by Het Geluidshuis. It helped Antwerp’s city museums past 1.9 million visitors that year. From 1 April to 30 August 2026 Drifting Belgians, by the Tehran-born artist Mashid Mohadjerin, followed the Belgians who tried to enter the United States through Canada after the quotas of the 1920s; in January 1923 an American border guard, John Coe, saw four figures under white sheets crossing the frozen Detroit River and called them ghost walkers. Next, from 20 November 2026 to 11 April 2027, comes an exhibition on language and migration, the end point of the two-year participatory project TAAL with artists, local communities and Kunst in zicht.

On the Eilandje

The sheds stand on the Eilandje, the old dock quarter north of the city centre, which is also home to the MAS, Antwerp’s museum on the river. The two make a useful pair: one about the port of Antwerp and the trade that built the city, the other about the people the port sent away. The museum’s programme, opening hours and tickets are on the Red Star Line Museum’s own website, with the current exhibitions.

The line left traces far beyond Antwerp. In The Godfather Part II the young Vito Corleone arrives in New York wearing a Red Star Line identification badge, and the Paris football club Red Star takes its name from the company, because the English housekeeper of its founder, Jules Rimet, had sailed with it.

The Red Star Line went bankrupt in 1934. Its sheds have done rather better.

Questions about the Red Star Line