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                                                            A Visit to Miss Liberty
                                                                                                     -  by Athens Garrote
 

Visiting New York will not be complete without a trip to Liberty Island. Just about 20 minutes boat ride
from the Battery Park Pier you could reach Liberty Island, the island where the famous green statue stand,
The Statue of Liberty.

Formally Liberty Enlightening the World, the Statue of Liberty is a colossal statue on Liberty Island in the
Upper New York Bay, U.S. It commemorates the friendship of the people of the United States and France.
Standing 305 feet, it represents a woman holding a torch in her raised right hand and a tablet bearing the
adoption date of the Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776) in her left hand.

The statue was constructed of copper sheets, hammered into shape by hand and assembled over a framework
of four gigantic steel supports, designed by Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel,
the same man who designed the Eiffel tower in Paris, France. In 1885 the completed statue was disassembled
and shipped to New York City. The pedestal, designed by American architect Richard Morris Hunt and built within
the walls of Fort Wood on Bedloe's Island (now known as Liberty Island), was completed later. The statue,
mounted on its pedestal, was dedicated by President Grover Cleveland on Oct. 28, 1886.

In the statue’s base an exhibit on its history can be found including the statue’s original 1886 torch. (Over the
years the torch underwent several modifications, including its conversion to electric power in 1916 and its
redesign in the mid-1980s.) The base is open for public but after the 9/11 incident the base was closed and no
one was allowed to go to the observatory deck, located at Miss Liberty’s crown. Other security measures
imposed on one of America’s visited landmark is a coast guard helicopter hovering around Hudson River 24/7,
which is equipped with surveillance machines capable of detecting even a single hand wave below.

Even though it was disappointing that we were not able to get inside the statue’s observation deck and
museum, It was enough to see the statue still standing amidst the terror that rocked the city that never sleeps.

Last modified: 22 April 2003