Lady of the Island

by Marcy Heidish

Three hundred and forty-two steps up and 21 stories high, you find yourself face to face with Liberty. You see her as a child might, looking into some huge and benign Halloween mask: the 3-foot mouth, the 4ý-foot nose. You pause, you look, you move on. Twelve more steps and one more story to the crown. Below, copper sheeting falls in folds, in swirls, pinioned to a web of iron strap work. Gently, the structure sways. Outside, a helicopter hums; it seems far away. You think of Jonah and the whale; you think of yourself within a dressmaker’s giant dummy. Here is nothing of the statue’s external image, its inspirational grace. Here, instead, are its underpinnings: beams and bolts, saddles and straps – eloquent in a different way. Up past signs that advise “Please Keep Moving” and graffiti that confides “Dan Was Here,” you emerge behind the statue’s crown; past its windows the harbor spreads, abruptly bright. You look through the glass, through the sun’s glare, and you see as if with the statue’s sight.

From her island pedestal, the Statue of Liberty once commanded New York’s skyline; from here she has watched the shifting currents of a century. Below her, bustle-skirted ladies blossomed into flappers; flappers evolved into hippies with American flags sewn onto their jeans. She has seen the panic of ’07 and the crash of ’29, the giddy ’20s and the desperate ’30s, and two World Wars. Her unperturbed gaze has witnessed the placid ’50s, the psychedelic ’60s, the disco ’70s, the cushy ’80s, and the bullish ’90s. Around her, ships have shed the last of their sails, and above her, the sky has filled with planes.

She has changed, too. A gift from France, and at first a symbol of libertÈ, she became Mother of Exiles to the millions passing through the immigration station on nearby Ellis Island, which is now a major museum. During World War I, with her image on Liberty Bonds, she began to symbolize the United States itself. But there have been other changes. The city skyline has spiked far above her reach. Her glowing copper skin has softened to a green patina. From 1984 to 1986, the statue underwent extensive and expensive restoration ($86 million, funded solely through donations) for the corroded support structure, popped rivets, and even the famed torch, which swayed unsafe and off-limits.

One wonders what to make of her now as we approach the new millennium – now that she no longer crowns the coast, now that these waves of immigration have ceased. Is Lady Liberty merely a quaint relic in the harbor, a mascot on key chains, a picture in a book?

“She still stands for everything that’s right with us,” says Jim Hill, who grew up in the statue’s shadow. “And you don’t need any background, any information, to appreciate her. She says liberty without music, without drums – without any backup at all.”

Jim Hill is part of a small community that clusters at the statue’s hem: the group of men and women who live or work on Liberty Island. Hill was born in 1925 in a house near the statue’s base. Though he no longer makes his home there, he recalls baseball games on summer evenings played out on the grass below the monument. He remembers going to school on a boat, not a bus. Over the years, he has watched the statue’s effect on a wide array of visitors: Fourth of July picnickers eating fried chicken, passionate pilgrims kissing the ground, somber mourners scattering ashes.

The Hill family has seen sightseers and schoolgirls and soldiers react with strong emotion – and Jim Hill remembers the emotion aboard his own ship, returning from World War II, when the Statue of Liberty swung into sight. He knows he isn’t the only one who remembers; veterans have long been frequent visitors. Like his father before him, Hill ran the island’s concession stand. Now retired, he has passed the business to his son, Brad – the third generation of Hills to center their lives on Liberty Island.

Over and over, one is struck by the continuity and dedication of Lady Liberty’s “extended family.” For Charlie DeLeo, a maintenance mechanic on Liberty Island, the statue has an almost mystical appeal. “She has a soul of her own – strong, caring,” he says. “She speaks to people in a silent language, universal – everyone understands. She speaks of what people have been fighting for for hundreds of years.” Five days a week at 7:30 in the morning, DeLeo ferries out to the island with the others who work for “the Lady.” They refer to the statue that way, these men in their plaid shirts and woolen caps. Many feel their job is an honor. “For me,” DeLeo says simply, “it’s a sacred vocation. The statue’s a shrine.”

DeLeo has an abiding sense of devotion to the statue. After almost 25 years there, “Charlie’s still keeping the flame,” says Sylvia Sanchez, who has herself worked on Liberty Island for more than 40 years. The place seems to create an extraordinary loyalty and community in many who serve there. For these unseen “flame-keepers,” Lady Liberty is “a family thing.” Diane H. Dayson, the current island superintendent, and the second woman to hold that post, is the daughter of the late chief of maintenance for the statue. Like Brad Hill’s concession stand, Dayson’s work has passed from generation to generation.

And, in this era of theme parks and theme hotels, video games and the World Wide Web, a new generation of visitors still comes, fascinated, to the island. Hardly a day goes by that no one arrives to see the monument, even in January’s frigid winds. Bad weather occasionally seals off the island, but when the ferries run, the people come. They stand outside, gazing up and up and up, and climb the great spiral stairs – and in summer the lines are even longer. People linger here; they look at the statue’s huge pensive eyes from without and from within. They come and stare into glass cases in the statue’s museum, at traces left by others who have passed this way: an Irish clay pipe, an Italian rolling pin, a German cookbook, a Jewish prayer book. And they, again, come face to face with the spirit of the place.

The statue seems to have noted them all: immigrants and servicemen and maintenance men, picnickers, park rangers, patriots. “The Lady” creates a cathedral-like, commanding presence and seems to watch us watching her. Weathered now, the statue looks wise and ancient, archetypal – somehow older than the nation she symbolizes. It is hard to imagine her the bright copper color of a penny, as she was when she first lifted the nation’s eyes, just over a century ago. It is hard to recall that she grew from the mind of a French intellectual, Edouard RenÈ Lefebvre de Laboulaye, and from the hands of an Alsatian sculptor, FrÈdÈric August Bartholdi, and from the plans of an engineering wizard, Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, whose famous tower became an emblem of France.

It was near Paris, over dinner, that the statue was conceived in 1865 – and there is something fitting about its inception in France, the nation that played such an important supportive role in the American Revolution. So important, indeed, that the names of architect Pierre L’Enfant and General Lafayette became a part of the United States’ own history. Professor de Laboulaye joined this honor roll, that night in 1865, as he mused to his guests about a monument to American independence – one that might also stir republican sentiment in the France of Napoleon III. Bartholdi was present, but it wasn’t until 1871, after the fall of Napoleon III during the Franco-Prussian War, that he was able to put his host’s musings on paper. Plans were drawn. Funds were raised. Models were made. By 1884, the statue was gazing out over the rooftops of Paris. By 1885, she was broken down into 350 sections and packed within 214 crates on the French frigate IsËre, bound for the United States.

But the Statue of Liberty seems always to have belonged to the citizens of the United States. More intimately than any other symbol, she tells us who we are – and who we ought to be. In her face, we recognize our best traits: courage, compassion, wisdom, hope. In her stance, we recognize our best selves: kind, confident, unbiased, strong. Alone, surrounded by water, she personifies the ideal of individualism. Arm raised, aglow, she epitomizes the belief in progress for all who seek it. A lighthouse, she says what beacons have always said: safe journey, land ho, welcome home.

But as a gift from another nation – and a symbol to immigrants from all over the globe – the Statue of Liberty is more than a cultural icon of the United States. It is more than an emblem of political freedom. It represents an ideal found wanting in all nations at one time or another, including the country where it stands. But it does stand, challenging both its country of residence and the larger world.

Lady Liberty was inspired by Egyptian monuments and French paintings, by Roman goddesses and the Colossus of Rhodes. She is Minerva and Madonna, Mother Nature and Mother Earth. Like the people of the United States, she is an amalgam; like most of us, she came from somewhere else. Now she seems to rise not just for recent immigrants but for everyone who has ever come to the United States.

And in the end, beyond analysis, beyond the words written to her and for her and on her, she endures – somehow a little taller than she was a century ago. She has been through more; we have been through more. Together we have survived. That shared history has made her matter to us more. We look at her again, afresh, this emissary to and from ourselves – we of a world recently grown more firm in our faith that democracy and freedom are the only future worthy of the past.

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