Ellis Island will reopen to the public on Monday, almost exactly a year after swells from Hurricane Sandy reached 8ft and badly damaged the former US immigration entry point.

"We are delighted to be able to share Ellis Island's uniquely American story with the world once more," Superintendent David Luchsinger said in a statement.

The storm, which hit the east coast of the US on 29 October 2012, swamped boilers and electrical systems, and the 27.5-acre island in New York harbour was without power for months. The Ellis Island Immigration Museum, housed in the main building on the island, showcases the stories of the millions of immigrants who passed through the island to start their lives in the United States.

More than a million documents, photographs and other artefacts at the museum survived the storm but were later moved because it was impossible to maintain the climate-controlled environment needed for their preservation, the parks service said. While the halls and buildings will reopen, the artefacts remain in a temporary storage facility in Maryland, park officials said. There is no estimate on when they will return to the island, because considerable work to upgrade and fix the buildings is still ongoing.

"You're not going to see a complete restoration of Ellis Island for a while," a spokesman, John Warren, said. Crews are still working on revamping so that the next bad storm will not leave the island shuttered for a year, he added.

Nearby Liberty Island, which also flooded during Sandy, reopened on 4 July but was closed during the partial federal government shutdown.

"I can think of no better way to celebrate Lady Liberty's 127th birthday than to welcome visitors back to the place where those 'huddled masses yearning to breathe free' first came to our shores," Luchsinger said, referring to a line in the Emma Lazarus poem The New Colossus, which is engraved on a plaque hung inside the statue's pedestal.

There is no cost estimate yet on how much it will take to repair and revamp the island.