served as an immigrant processing depot from 1855 to 1890. Most of the fort, except for the section along the shoreline, was surrounded by a wooden fence. The fence, measuring high, was intended to keep out unauthorized immigration agents. In addition, the residential outbuildings around the fort became offices. At the center of the fort was the waiting area, known as the rotunda. The immigrant registration depot included a quadrangle of desks arranged around this waiting area, as well as restrooms flanking the main entrance. The waiting area also had wooden benches. Although there are no precise figures for the capacity of the waiting area, various sources give a capacity of between 2,000 and 4,000. An enclosed balcony was installed around the waiting area circa 1869. Before being processed at Castle Garden, immigrants underwent medical inspections at the Marine Hospital on Staten Island, where ill immigrants were quarantined. After passing their medical inspection, immigrants boarded a steamship, which traveled to a dock along the northern side of Castle Garden; the dock faced away from Battery Park, preventing immigrants from entering Manhattan before they had been processed. Immigrants were inspected a second time before entering the fort. Inside the depot, a New York state emigration clerk registered each immigrant and directed them to another desk, where a second clerk advised each immigrant about their destination. Each of the immigrants then received a bottle of bathwater and returned to the dock, where their baggage was collected. The New York Central Railroad and the New York and Erie Railroad sold train tickets at Castle Garden as well. Many of Castle Garden's original immigrant passenger records were stored at Ellis Island, where they were destroyed in a fire in 1897. Sources cite 7.5 million or 8 million immigrants as having been processed at Castle Garden. These account for the vast majority of the nearly 10 million immigrants who passed through the Port of New York between 1847 and 1890. The majority of immigrants processed at Castle Garden were from European countries, namely Denmark, England, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Russia, Scotland, and Sweden. The structure was known as by German immigrants and by Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews. The word became a generic term for any situation that was noisy, confusing or chaotic, or where a "babel" of languages was spoken (a reference to the multitude of languages heard spoken by the immigrants from many countries at