When last I left you, we were hopping on the subway at Union Station.
We pick back up at 42nd St...
We hoofed it west to Pier 83 down 42nd, which led us to the back of the Lyric Theater, where Sam and I will be seeing Harry Potter in January.
We ended up quite early to the Pier, but it was very cold and we were beat. I had purchased the "Premier" upgrade tickets, more on that later, but it allowed us to get our wristbands and hang out in the Premier tent, sheltered from the bitter wind coming off the water. I pulled up some of the photos I'd taken and Marci sees the one below, which I had snapped just a few minutes before we arrived, and said, "Where was that?!"
How do you walk past this and not notice?
Only in NYC.
We ended up being the only ones to use the tent, and when we peeked out and saw them starting to form a line at the green screen photo booth, our guy put us at the head of the line and straight onto the boat into the Premier section. We got a cookie while we waited.
The real perk of the upgrade is once the tour is underway. Only the people with the Premiere wristbands have access to the top deck of the boat as well as the covered front on the second level. Bonus: private bathroom on the top level.
Since it was hovering around freezing, we were on the water, and the wind was pretty fierce, only a few of us crazy Premiere people took advantage of the outdoor views, so for a lot of it, it was almost like having this huge cruiser to ourselves. Okay, having it to MYSELF. Marci braved the outdoors for a bit. She also has a jacket that has a heater built in that she charges up and still didn't hang around too long.
Anyway, back to the views... sun setting before we left the dock
Did I wish I had my good camera at this moment? Yes, yes I did.
Ellis Island in the dark
and our approach to the Statue of Liberty
The Statue of Liberty was proposed in 1865 at the close of the Civil War, by Édouard René de Laboulaye, a French abolitionist who greatly admired the Union's cause and victory, and Frédéric Bartholdi, a sculptor, as as memorial to independence and freedom shared by the two countries' struggle against monarchy and slavery. Bartholdi traveled to America in the summer of 1871 with letters of introduction from Laboulaye, and his first glimpse of the U.S. was through New York harbor, where Bedloe's island, owned not by New York but by the U.S. government, appeared as the perfect place for such a tribute.
His sketch of the neoclassical female figure as Liberty evolved to produce the seven rays from her crown, forming a halo which, along with Liberty's torch in her right hand, evoked the suggestion that freedom enlightens the world. He had considered having her holding a broken chain, but decided this would prove too divisive so soon after the Civil War, so instead she stands astride it, which makes it difficult to spot from the ground. In her left hand she holds a "tabula ansata" to represent law (versus the freedom that descends into anarchy) and inscribed the date of the Declaration of Independence at her feet.
Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, architect and friend of Bartholdi, designed a brick peir inside the statue to anchor the copper sheets of skin. They used a method called repoussé, heating the sheets of copper and hammering them into shape with wooden mallets. The choice of copper meant the sheets could be less than an inch thin, and therefore light for the 151 foot statue. "Light" is relative, of course, as it required 200,000 pounds of copper in all.
A decade after the first discussion, the U.S. was approaching its Centennial, and Laboulaye announced the project and the formation of the Franco-American Union to raise funds for the statue entitled, "Liberty Enlightening the World." The proposal had the French financing the statue and the Americans paying for the pedestal.
At the Centennial exhibition in Philadelphia the arm was displayed, with the balcony of the torch open to view the fairgrounds. It then moved to New York and Madison Square Park for a few years before it was time to return to France to join the rest of Lady Liberty.
The original architect died in 1879 without leaving details about how he intended to complete his work. In 1880 Gustave Eiffel was brought in, who changed a number of aspects of what was known regarding the structure, and created a secondary skeleton attached a center pylon so that the statue could move in the winds and expand in the heat.
A New York group eventually took on most of the responsibility for fundraising for the pedestal. 19 year old Teddy Roosevelt was one of its members. President Grant, on his last day in office, signed the resolution to accept the gift. The fundraising started and stalled and hit years where no one thought it was a good idea. Joseph Pulitzer announced a drive to raise $100,000, pledging to print the name of any and every donor in his paper, which he did, from an Iowa kindergarten's class contribution of $1.35 to the 60 cents sent in by "a young girl alone in the world." By the end of the drive, they had raised $102,000, 80% of which were made up of contributions of less than $1.
Emma Lazarus was asked to donate an original poem. Inspired by the conditions Jewish immigrants were forced to live in after fleeing from Eastern Europe, she wrote the sonnet from which the inscription on the base of the Statue is taken:
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
MOTHER OF EXILES. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
On June 17, 1885, she arrived from France, with hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers on hand to welcome her at the docks but her pedestal was not completed until the spring of 1886 when she could be reconstructed. The original plan to install floodlights on the balcony was mixed by the Army Corps of Engineers out of concern for blinding the ships' pilots.
It was at this point that portholes were cut into the torch so that lights could be placed inside them.
She was dedicated on October 28, 1886, more than two decades after her initial inception.
Her pedestal and statue were closed on September 11, 2001 and the pedestal did not reopen to the public until August, 2004, while the statue herself remained off-limits to visitors until July 4, 2009. Visits to her crown would be very limited and require tickets months in advance in order to visit.
When I discovered this, in preparation for the October visit, I checked out availability. In the first week of October, everything was sold out through 2018. The first available date? January 6. The weekend Samantha and I will be in New York to see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.
And now also visit Lady Liberty's Crown.
a nice line up of the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg bridges in one shot
Once we had made it up to Queens, we turned around and made our way back, at which point, having more photos of the city lights than anyone ever needed, I elected to go thaw out with Marci inside.
On the way out, the hawkers had their green screen creations that, of course, we bought. It was our only super kitschy souvenir of the trip.
We headed back for the long cold walk up 42nd through Times Square.
and collapsed into bed, because we're doing it all again tomorrow.
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