"Everything in America is Bigger....Even Peas."

Who would ever have thought, even in the midst of global warming, that on January 7 in New York Harbor on the way to Liberty Island people would be peeling off outer layers of clothing, but so it was as the temps soared above sixty. You get your own taste of an Ellis Island experience as you wait to board the ferry -- first outside after buying tickets as you snake through the cordons and then inside the tent at dockside where the herders keep urging visitors to "move forward" or "fill in" and then when the gangplank comes down and everyone presses forward at once. But once we got to Liberty, nee Bedloe Island, so long as we avoided the concessions, it felt like we had the island to ourselves, especially inside the base of the monument, an add-on I just stumbled upon making the online ticket buy even though the informational brochures say you need two days advance reservation. Inside the base we walked through the chronologically-arranged exhibition that tells the history of the statue from conception to the bicentennial restoration to Liberty's status as universal commercial icon (a status amply exploited by the island's own concession store where we passed up the opportunity to buy a Statue of Liberty mask, a Statue of Liberty crown, and every other junk bit). The Statue is made of copper sheets, only two pennies thick, and still weighs 225 tons pounds. To have constructed it any other way would have made its weight unsupportable. The idea of the statue, originating with the French politician Edouard de Laboulaye, was in its own way subversive, to contrast the liberty just successfully defended in the U.S. through the North's triumph in the Civil War with the repression of the Second Empire in France. The designer, sculptor Auguste Bartholdi, modeled it in part on an earlier design for a statue in Egypt, in part on the Colossus of Rhodes, and in part on the face of his mother. He traveled to the US in 1871 looking for a site, giving posterity both the "peas" quote and the choice of Bedloe Island. The statue was build in France, disassembled, shipped to the U.S. and riveted together by immigrant workmen on site on the island. They worked without scaffolding and unlike that other nearby marvel, the Brooklyn Bridge, no one died in its assembly. The statue was meant to symbolize enlightenment but thanks in part to Emma Lazurus's "The New Colossus" poem came instead to mean "welcome" to the immigrants who came through the Narrows, past it and into New York Harbor. The museum has full size replicas of the Statue's face and one of the feet, showing the scale -- taller than me --, the relative light weight of the copper sheathing and the craftsmanship, including the thousands of copper rivets. It was an inspiring day, but most of all thanks to the display of excerpts from letters written to Lee Iacocca, chair of the restoration campaign. They contained small donations, no more than a dollar in some cases, and came from those who decades before had sailed past Liberty, built the new lives they'd sought and now wanted to give back to the restoration campaign. Most of the visitors the day we visited seemed to come more from out of country than out of city/state, perhaps a commentary on the weak dollar. As for us, we were tourists in our own city. You could do that for a long time in New York.