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National Geographic : 1990 Sep
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A 1906 noonday dinner featured beef stew, boiled potatoes, and rye bread, with herring for Hebrews, plus crackers and milk for women and children. By 1917 meat was served at sup per too. Myron Surmach tasted apple pie for the first time; others ate their first banana. World War I temporarily curbed the immigration flow. Restrictive laws in the 1920s cut the numbers and required inspection of immigrants by U. S. consular officials abroad. During World War II Ellis Island was a detention center for illegal or criminal aliens already in the United States. The Coast Guard also trained recruits here. After the war fewer people were detained, and the facility was closed in 1954; its 42 structures fell to vandals, thieves, and decay. Only artifacts of little value, such as these rusty pans, remained when restorers began their work in 1983. They found that as time and weather took their toll, multiple layers of paint peeled from interior walls, revealing traces of graffiti left by immigrants on the original plas ter. In detention and waiting rooms the restorers noted ini tials, dates from 1900 to 1954, poems, portraits, cartoons, birds, flowers, and religious symbols. Some were written in pencil, others in the blue chalk inspectors used. Among the comments scrawled in Italian: "Damned is the day I left my homeland" and "Giuseppe and Achille came to the Battery the day of the 18th of May, Saturday 1901." And in Greek: "Blast you America with your much money who took the Greeks away from their race." A fine-arts restorer was called in to preserve this direct link to the past. More accustomed to working on frescoes in Italy, Christy Adams used scalpel and swab to remove overpaint and make visible such scenes as this incised ship, belching smoke and apparently flying the Greek flag (above). The section of wall with this image was moved to a second-floor-west exhibit called "Through America's Gate," about the medical inspection, mental tests, legal exams, and ship manifests, which were the only records of arriving immigrants. Many later recorded their impressions. An Armenian boy, George Mardikian, loved the hot-water shower so much, he recalled, "I began to sing." A 14-year-old Jewish girl, Sylvia Bernstein, fleeing the anti-Semitic atmosphere in 1914 Austria, pretended to be 16-an adult-to join a brother already in New York. Women traveling unaccompanied were detained until a male relative came to fetch them. Sylvia found her two-day wait very exciting. "They feed you and they watch you [because of] white slavery. Sunday my brother picked me up. Monday I got a job." Ellis Island
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