21. Statue of Liberty
There are some NYC tourist traps you will easily fall into through the course of 39 years here, but the Statue of Liberty is not one of them. I do not have to pass through it for work and they don’t sell candy there, unlike the M&M store. I also don’t have extended family visiting who want a tour guide. My family is small and mostly in New York already, plus pretty elderly. I haven’t done a survey, but I assume everyone who has wanted to go went before I was born.
I bought a ticket to go to the crown on a rainy afternoon in the middle of the week before school lets out. I’ll tell you right now—I did not go up to the crown.
There were so many steps to the journey, within the statue itself, but also to reach the boat there in the first place. In fact, I’m going to include a little map and some SEO in this post so people looking to go can more easily find functional instructions. The port for the boat to the Statue of Liberty is in Battery Park, but you have to physically get your ticket after buying it online inside the Castle Clinton Museum.
That took me a while to figure out and then I dropped my ticket in the bathroom at the Castle and had to go back and look for it. After passing the ticket check, which is separate from the ticket booth, you go through the first leg of security, a truly bizarre liminal space. It almost looks like airport security except there’s no clear designation for where to go after you’ve gotten the pat down. You are no longer their concern, figure it out, asshole. Everyone did want to know if I was wearing a belt, I guess in case I tried to choke out Lady Liberty. Not without your consent, ma’am.
You are allowed to bring a knife, but only if it falls within a specific size range.
It was drizzling and the river was covered in a fog so thick it had a personality, perhaps even a sense of humour. The Statue and Governors’ Island and Ellis Island bobbed around in the murk. The crowd seemed big to me, but I’m sure at peak times it’s absolutely soul crushingly horrible.
There was plenty of room for us on the boat, which was followed by a bunch of different birds hoping to eat tourist scraps. I saw ring-billed gulls, sparrows galore, and a lone cormorant. I decided to stand out on the deck, hovering in a corner and enjoying a quiet moment alone. I wondered why no one else was jockeying for the position until we started off and the loudspeaker blasted to life right in my ear. I did the exact same thing to myself on the way back, standing in a different corner that also had a loudspeaker I didn’t check for. The recorded message was some nonsense about America and very peppy.
The boat makes a long loop around the statue, pulling into a port on the far south side. I don’t know if that is on purpose to give viewers a more dramatic first look at the star of the island, but it works. I have obviously never seen it so close and you know what? It’s cool. It’s a real big statue of a lady with beefy forearms and she looks rad coming out of the mist.
Her proportions are surprising. She seems both huge and smaller than you’d guess after placing your memory of her outline on the horizon against her actual scale by your side. The mind can’t balance the two pictures out.
When we disembarked, I wanted to be as efficient as possible, so I watched to see if everyone waiting to get on board to leave could fit, judging how soon I’d have to get in line to get home. Then I sped walked to the pedestal. Again, security to enter the statue is weird. They want to double check belts. Yet, you can bring liquids that convincingly look like water inside. Sadly, I really was carrying water.
There are a lot of steps up through the base, however, I think they make a real meal of telling you exactly how many. It’s more of a psychological pressure of having to take the stairs than a really abnormal number of stairs to take, if you know what I mean. Places for people to have panic or heart attacks are marked as “refuge” spaces, which is even more alarming.
When you are up as far as you can be without getting into her body, there’s a balcony to check out the view. There were a lot of kids running around in the narrow walkway and a couple who seemed to be on a first or second date. The islands dipped in and out of the white, sometimes some ghostly trees, sometimes some industrial buildings making a haunted appearance. There was a lot of construction going on below, and little green. The lawns were mushy brown for the season, the branches bare. The light was gray in the most unflattering way possible as my selfies later confirmed.
I went back inside, where the parks department guards had just changed shifts. If you buy a ticket to the crown, you are given a bright pink wristband that you must put on in front of the ticket teller. The guard cut it off as I crossed into the next zone, up a small flight of stairs which I expected to continue as it turned onto a platform. To my unpleasant surprise, the platform revealed a different staircase, a thin spiral rising up from my claustrophobic nightmares. Now, sitting comfortably on my couch, it’s easy to see I should have sucked it up and climbed, even though it would have just been the same view through a smaller peephole. At the time, I felt like quitting was the best choice and exited through the down staircase. A different guard, who saw me enter on the other side of the pedestal moments earlier, made no remark. I’m sure it’s a common occurrence.
Down all the many stairs I went, past the refuge areas, and out through the turning gates. I reached the pier right as another boat arrived and found the special deck corner for the ceremonial deafening.
The boat home stopped to pick up more tourists on Ellis Island, so now I have been there for the first time as well, entirely against my will. The place only ran as a federal processing center for immigrants from 1892 until 1954, despite its enormous NYC reputation. I have looked and seen someone with my great-grandmother’s name who arrived there in 1922 on the Oscar II. Unfortunately, as a callow youth I never checked with my grandmother if it was her and now she is dead. On the other side are about 44 Lutkins and I can only imagine I am related to all of them in some capacity. I believe one of them is my great-grandfather in 1930; again, I’m not sure.
I wanted to write something concise and pithy about American exceptionalism and how well-encapsulated it is by the narrative around both the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, but I think this newsletter might be too stupid for that.
Finally, finally, we arrived back in Battery Park and I dragged myself painfully home. The next day I was so tired I felt like throwing up. I now think that the Statue feeds off the souls of visitors and the whole ploy of making it a tourist spot it to keep the demon full. Otherwise, she’ll climb down and wade across to Wall Street and set her torch to the bull.
Daryl Dixon seeing another version of the Statue of Liberty in a zombie destroyed Paris.
The statue in Paris was given to France by America three years after they gave us a bigger, better one. As described in Atlas Obscura:
The statue itself was given to the city of Paris in 1889 by the American community in Paris to commemorate the centennial of the French Revolution. In characteristic American fashion, the statue was officially inaugurated on the Fourth of July (a date not at all associated with the French Revolution) rather than Bastille Day (a mere ten days later, and often described to the uninitiated as the “French Fourth of July”). To be fair, the inauguration was presided over by French President Marie François Sadi Carnot, who probably had other things to do on Bastille Day (also, the statue’s tablet bears the date July 14, 1789, as well as July 4, 1776).
I know it’s propaganda, but Emma Lazarus’s poem still kinda gets me…too embarrassing to admit??
Was I right to skip the crown?