Word: monumentalize
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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HISTORY: A monument to the great gateway...
...ancestor who passed through its doors. Abandoned more than three decades ago, Ellis Island reopens its doors this week as pure, potent symbol. After a ; seven-year, $156 million restoration, the most expensive single refurbishment in the nation's history, the main building has been transformed into a monument to the majesty and pain of the immigrant experience...
...often when America builds a monument, it's to one great individual, " says American University history professor Alan Kraut, who was an adviser on the project. "What is so special about Ellis Island is it really is a monument to the masses." The chief monument is the main building itself, a beaux arts structure with French Renaissance trappings that was erected in 1900 after fire destroyed an earlier terminal. Immigration dropped off sharply after Congress imposed restrictive quotas in the 1920s, and by 1954 Ellis Island was abandoned to the pigeons and vandals. Its revival was supervised by the Statue...
...here for two more weeks, there's a chance they'll do something even more ridiculous before they leave. We're going down to Washington for three days, and I hope they don't get it into their heads to drain the reflecting pool or rock climb the Washington Monument...
...procrastination has had less to do with political attitudes toward F.D.R. than with bickering over the size of the monument. The design by San Francisco landscape architect Lawrence Halprin was finally approved by the Commission of Fine Arts, which had accepted a larger version of the concept in 1978. It took a plea last fall by Florida Congressman Claude Pepper, who had been a Senator when F.D.R. was President, to get a $5.8 million appropriation | passed to begin the $47 million project. Terminally ill with cancer, Pepper got out of bed to make his pitch in his last public appearance...