NYC Episode 2
It was a rainy and cold day, but that did not stop us from taking the ferry to Liberty Island to see the Statue of Liberty up close. Because of the weather, we decided to visit only the interior of the statue’s base, and we also chose not to step off at Ellis Island, where millions of immigrants were processed upon arriving in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century.
The story of the Statue of Liberty begins in France in the year eighteen sixty-five, when the political scientist Édouard René de Laboulaye proposed the creation of a grandiose monument that the French people would gift to the United States of America. The idea was not just a simple diplomatic gesture, but a celebration of the centennial of the Declaration of Independence and the abolition of slavery, a common ideal that united the two republics. The sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi was deeply inspired by this vision and quickly began to sketch the design of a monumental female figure that would carry the torch of freedom.
To turn this sketch into a real and stable structure, Bartholdi turned to the engineering genius of Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel, the man who would become famous for the tower in Paris. Eiffel designed an innovative internal iron skeleton, flexible and resistant, which allowed the copper skin to breathe and withstand the strong winds of New York Harbor. While the French worked diligently on shaping the gigantic copper pieces, the Americans had an equally difficult task to fulfill in building the massive pedestal on an island in New York Harbor, then called Bedloe’s Island.
Funding the project represented a huge challenge on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. In France, funds were raised through public donations, entertainment shows, and raffles. In the United States, the construction of the pedestal stalled due to a lack of money, and the rescue came from the journalist Joseph Pulitzer. He launched an aggressive campaign in his newspaper, promising to publish the name of every person who donated even a single cent. The strategy worked perfectly, with thousands of ordinary people contributing to the creation of the monument’s base.
The complete statue was first assembled in Paris, then dismantled into over three hundred individual pieces and packed into more than two hundred huge crates for the voyage at sea. The French ship Isère transported the precious cargo across the ocean, arriving at its destination in the summer of the year eighteen eighty-five. Reassembling it on the newly completed pedestal took several months, being a huge metal puzzle put together at height by brave workers.
The official inauguration took place on October twenty-eighth, eighteen eighty-six, under the gaze of President Grover Cleveland and an impressive crowd of spectators. Although the shiny copper initially had a brownish tint like a new coin, within a few decades natural oxidation transformed the monument into the distinctive light green shade we admire today. The statue quickly became the first symbol of hope for the millions of immigrants who passed by it on their way to Ellis Island, marking the beginning of a new life in the new world.
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