NYC Ferry Restaurant Tour, Part V: Crown Cafe (Statue City Cruises to Liberty Island)
Islowly encircled the Statue of Liberty. A few steps, a picture. A few steps more, another picture. Zoom in, zoom out. Reach the other side and circle back. Two of my grandparents, and probably some great-grandparents, passed the great lady as they reached New York Harbor after rough sea crossings from Europe and Britain. But I had lived in New York City for nearly 49 years by the time I first set foot on Liberty Island. This was a bucket-list day.
The idea had been in my mind for decades, on the bottom of a long list of work and life priorities — but when those drifted away, it became more compelling. Over the past several months it began materializing into an active possibility.
One morning I woke up, not knowing that would be the day when I would meet Lady Liberty in person — after a lifetime of seeing other people’s pictures of her. And two years of shooting her from distant perspectives around the metro area. And thinking about it. And thinking about it…
But the weather was fine, I needed something to do, and actively exploring previously unseen parts of the city — something I once did only on weekends — had become an all-consuming passion. A little quick research found the official ferry option to Liberty Island, I figured out what to do for lunch, because all my urban explorations involve lunch, and off I went.
Googling a prospective Statue of Liberty visit may bring you into contact with shady operators. Be warned that the sole official transportation option to Liberty Island is Statue City Cruises. The National Park Service, which runs Liberty Island, cautions that “street vendors do not sell genuine Statue of Liberty tickets,” and that “purchasing tickets through vendors other than Statue City Cruises may result in unnecessary additional charges.”
The Statue City Cruise to Liberty Island starts from Battery Park City in Lower Manhattan and stops at Ellis Island, New York’s early 20th-century immigration hub, on the way back. A second route operates from Liberty State Park in Jersey City.
I lined up with fellow Statue-goers at the dock in Lower Manhattan’s Battery Park City. I’m guessing most were Not from Around Here, whether they were native-born or not. Perhaps that’s what has kept me from visiting the Statch all these years — the prospect of being stuck in a mob of out-of-towners.
But lately I’ve changed my mind about that. I have been trying to see my city through the eyes of a tourist, having been a hopeful guest in so many other people’s countries, and now I find the company of my fellow tourists congenial. I often find myself giving them directions, just as people abroad have done for me. Our ride was the Hornblower Freedom.
And we were off! That’s Liberty Island glimmering faintly in the distance. After waiting in the hot sun to board the boat, I opted for the AC down below over the top deck with the views. I figured I’d soon have even better views, realized I’d soon be sweating buckets, and wanted to do this bucket-list trip without actually kicking one.
Along the way we saw other Statue City Cruises ships.
We arrived.
We disembarked…
…and there she was, with her back to us. The great lady, at last. The Liberty Island ferry terminal has a covered shelter though not sufficient for a large crowd. The tan on my freckled forearms deepened a little that day.
A gift from the people of France to the people of the United States, as well as a beacon to migrants crossing the harbor to the New World, the Statue of Liberty was first proposed at the end of the U.S. Civil War. Our French admirers and benefactors — who previously had supported the American Revolution — intended the gift to celebrate both the emancipation of American slaves in 1865 and the centennial of the Declaration of Independence in 1876, though the statue was not completed until 1886. Here is an artist’s rendering of the dedication.
Lady Liberty has multiple classical antecedents but the main one is Libertas, the Roman goddess of freedom. The Romans used her image in coins, as many nations subsequently did, including the United States.
Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, the French artist who designed the statue, intended her design to be “bold and clear.”
It is not without subtlety, though. Strike the Liberty pose and you’ll find yourself with most of your weight on your left leg, and with your right leg slightly back, as though you were striding forward.
The pose appears static when viewed from the front…
…but dynamic when viewed from the side, as Liberty marches into the future.
This use of an asymmetrical pose, known as contrapposto, dates from the Greek and Roman classical traditions and was revived in the Renaissance by Michelangelo and da Vinci. Michelangelo’s “David” is another famous example.
The Statue of Liberty uses “curtain wall construction,” with the exterior’s copper plates attached to a skeleton that follows the body’s curves, all supported by a straight vertical center pylon. The statue is not supported by the copper cladding we see on the outside. It may appear rugged, but it is just 2.4mm thick, or less than one-tenth of an inch. She has instead, literally, a backbone of iron.
Yet the ingenious three-piece structure — masterminded by Gustave Eiffel, designer of the Eiffel Tower in Paris — gives the lady an underlying toughness. To avoid structural failure, she is flexible enough to sway gently in the wind, and to cope with heat- and cold-related expansion and contraction, thanks to the daunting variety of bars, springs, and saddles connecting the iron skeleton to the copper skin. Each of the saddles, the curved parts right beneath the visible surface, was individually shaped to follow the curves of the beaten copper.
Parts of the statue, including the head and the torch, were assembled in Paris and shipped across the Atlantic. By this time President (and Civil War hero) Ulysses S. Grant had already accepted the gift on behalf of the American people and President (and noted abolitionist) Rutherford B. Hayes had selected the site, on federally owned Bedloe’s Island, which became known as Liberty Island.
The designer considered crowning her with a pileus, or Phrygian cap, or liberty cap, like that given to emancipated Roman slaves. Here is an example from Thomas Crawford’s “Statue of Freedom,” dedicated in 1863, which tops the dome of the U.S. Capitol.
Sculptor Bartholdi opted instead for something that evokes both a radiant crown (or sun crown, in Egyptian iconography) and a halo (used in numerous religious traditions).
She wears a pella, or cloak…
…gracefully draped over a stola, or gown.
In her right hand, of course, is the torch. The original design called for it to be a copper shell covered in gold leaf and lit by floodlights (from Liberty Island’s own independent power station). It was feared that the torch would blind sea captains steering ships through the harbor, so Bartholdi cut holes in the torch and illuminated it with interior lights. However, a commission appointed in 1982 restored Bartholdi’s original design, and the new torch made its debut — on a structurally strengthened arm — in 1986. This lady has only gotten better and stronger with age.
In her left hand is a tabula ansata, or tablet with handles, with the Declaration of Independence signing date in roman numerals. JULY IV MDCCLXXVI = JULY 4, 1776.
The pedestal, today slightly encumbered by scaffolding, was the third of three proposed designs — you’ll see models of them when we get to the museum.
One feature you won’t see — unless you’re in a helicopter — are the broken chains and shackles at Lady Liberty’s feet. Erected only a few decades after the American Civil War, she was not on speaking terms with slavemasters.
The Statue of Liberty Museum has a modest presence that does not visually compete with the towering artwork. But it skillfully tells the story of Liberty Island in an accessible way, with exhibits, artifacts, and a brief but evocative video.
Appreciation for the museum’s benefactors. “To honor Albert Einstein,” says one inscription. He was an immigrant.
Let’s take a look around, shall we?
The following curved-screen images are from the video presentation. It showed us the project’s original name when our friends, the people of France, initiated the project. They had just founded a republic of their own, based on liberté, égalité, fraternité. The full name is Liberty Enlightening the World.
Among the founding fathers, as it were, of the Statue of Liberty was Édouard de Laboulaye, a French historian and abolitionist, who proposed a monument celebrating both the emancipation of slaves and American independence. Immigration was not originally among the envisioned themes. It was not until later that Ellis and Liberty islands were consolidated into a single experience, the Emma Lazarus poem (“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses”) was added to the statue on a plaque, and Liberty’s image was imprinted on the memories of countless migrants.
The artist who designed Liberty Enlightening the World was Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, a Frenchman from the Alsace region…
…shown here in his studio.
I’ll interrupt the video captures to note that although most of Bartholdi’s other works are in France, he also designed a smaller Statue of Liberty for Potosí, Bolivia. Unveiled in 1890, four years after New York’s monument, it celebrated Bolivia’s declaration of independence in 1825. The South American nation was the last one in Latin America to secede from Spain.
Back to the video captures. The artist received some engineering help from Gustave Eiffel, a French citizen with German roots whose works are scattered throughout Europe and Latin America. He is best known for the Eiffel Tower in Paris and had a pre-computer genius for structural issues.
As I was too old and effete to climb stairs to the crown, I had to be satisfied with this tantalizing glimpse of the winding stairs. It would be unreasonable to expect an 1886 creation, fragile and frequently renovated, to have an elevator all the way to the top, though there is one ascending to the top of the pedestal.
Overhead were banners showing the causes for which the lady stands: Free Speech. Equality. Suffrage. Independence. Rule of Law.
The components of Liberty’s form started with small plaster models in Bartholdi’s studio. These were enlarged to larger plaster versions at a monumental scale.
The enlarged plaster models were covered with wooden latticework to form molds. Carpenters removed the plaster, then used wooden hammers to beat heated copper sheets against the wood, forming the copper skin that covers the statue’s iron skeleton.
My unwitting model indicated the scale of the parts.
Contemplating the lady’s size in an indoor setting felt surreal.
The fierce face of Liberty, modeled after a Roman goddess.
Sometimes things are not what they appear. I don’t think the young gentleman was actually picking Liberty’s nose. She doesn’t look happy about it, though.
The torch went through several iterations, one of which was this metal and glass construction.
The original torch holder.
Don’t grieve for the original torch. It was not what Bartholdi proposed. But it has a safe permanent home here in the museum.
A through-the-window reminder that the new torch, “a gilded, closed copper shell lit from outside,” closer to the original vision, is out there, waiting to be seen.
Two pedestal designs were proposed and rejected before the third, far right, was adopted for reasons of cost. It appears notably shorter, and that is probably a good thing — it prevents the pedestal from competing with the great lady’s sweeping, dynamic form.
Dining options are not plentiful on Liberty Island. Either you brown-bag it, save your appetite for the nicer cafeteria at nearby Ellis Island — next stop on the Statue City Cruise — or you opt for the Crown Cafe.
I went for the fish & chips, perhaps a nod to the English tastes of the rebellious colonists.
Next stop, Ellis Island. Had I known that the WPA murals in the dining rom awaited, I might have had lunch there. If I do it again, I’ll leave earlier and munch among the murals.
During the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the Works Progress Administration to create a Federal Art Project to put hundreds of artists to work creating more than 100,000 civic artworks in post offices and other federal buildings across the country. In the next several panels is the largest mural in the Ellis Island dining room.
This massive 1935 work by Edward Laning depicts the building of the transcontinental railroad, the first transportation link between the east and west coasts of the United States, from 1863–69, by three private railroads with the help of federal land grants.
It depicts backbreaking and dangerous work, involving not bulldozers and backhoes and trucks, but pickaxes and wheelbarrows and mule-drawn carts. Much of it was performed by imported Chinese laborers.
A grateful nation expressed its thanks with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, a race-based immigration ban that lasted into the middle of the 20th century.
Another large panel, on a more general immigration-related theme.
Labor and teamwork are celebrated.
Miscellaneous scenes, including a Native American who looks upon the incomers.
Generations of migrants — probably including my own German, English, Scottish, and Irish forebears — trooped through Ellis Island’s Registry Room from 1900–24.
Although Ellis Island was probably state of the art as early 20th-century immigration facilities go, the process was not easy for migrants due to the nation’s ambivalence about the role of cheap labor in its economy. Back in the days before migrants had mobile phones…
…they had to prove they were willing to work (to avoid burdening social services) but couldn’t admit they had jobs waiting for them (because cheaper foreign labor riled native-born workers).
In frustration and boredom, they scratched initials and messages into the stony walls of the early 20th-century immigration complex. Some, having endured a hard voyage, were put back on the same boats and sent home.
It had been a physically and emotionally exhausting day, I reflected, getting back on the boat to Battery Park City, but not nearly as exhausting as it must have been to be a migrant at the turn of the 20th century — or today, for that matter.
No long-awaited bucket-list trip to a New York landmark would be complete without a fridge magnet. At $4.95, made of solid two-tone metal, it was a good value.
Thank you, whomever, for this gift of life, for the privilege of living in this great city, in this great country, and for the privilege of still being able to enjoy it. One more off the bucket list. Still not ready for the bucket. There is so much more in this city that I have never seen.
Previously on the NYC Ferry Restaurant Tour:
Part I: The Wharf (Rockaway Route to Rockaway Park)
Part II: Kimo’s Kitchen (Rockaway Route to Rockaway Beach)
Part III: Big John’s (Rockaway Route to Sunset Park)
Part IV: Salty Dog (South Brooklyn Route to Bay Ridge)
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