Statue of Liberty

Classic view

 When you are in New York there is one thing you can't miss, and that's the Statue of Liberty (even though I did miss it last time I was there). This was probably the most touristy thing we did, I doubt you can get more touristy than that. If you are organised you could get tickets to visit either the pedestal or the crown, but it seemed like you needed to be 6 months organised to go up the crown. So we did neither of those things, you can still visit the island though and wander around, which is good in it's own right. Definitely go early, you want to be on one of the first boats, it does take a surprisingly long time to see everything.

It's really massive

There is a bit of history on the island, and it's quite large, so it never feels that crowded. At one point it looked likely that it might not even be erected on the island. The US was in charge of financing the pedestal, while the French would pay for the actual statue. The French were going great guns, with the statue being easily paid for, whilst the US was lagging far behind. The government was refusing to pay anything for it, other cities started to offer to pay in return for the statue being moved to their location. It wasn't until Joseph Pulitzer got involved and said he would publish the names of everyone who contributed in his newspaper that the donations started to flow.

The statue is quite interesting in itself. It was designed by a French sculptor, Bartholdi, but he didn't really know how to erect it. Gustave Eiffel got involved, so the statue is actually a massive tower, with the copper skin just wrapped around it. It was one of the first instances of a structure where the outer walls are not load bearing, which is how a lot of skyscrapers are built nowadays. He actually built the statue before he did the Eiffel Tower. He really got into the tower building.

Getting to and from the island is a real experience in tourist herding, and since everyone has such practise in it, it's pretty smooth. There is a bit of waiting around, and you may think, as you are standing in this massive crush of people, that there is no way you are all going to fit on the boat. But then you all fit, there are never people left behind waiting for the next boat. It's this massive empty shell of a boat, designed for maximum people carrying.

When you buy a ticket to the statue, you get a ticket to the Ellis Island Immigration museum at the same time. This was kind of interesting, I wouldn't spend too long here, but it did have some interesting stuff. It kind of got smashed in hurricane Sandy, and is still recovering, apparently the whole island was submerged. You could tell that a bit from the exhibits, there were a few that were closed and some of it still seemed a bit half-done.

It was here though that I learned that the US was getting on average 1 million immigrants between 1905 and 1914, which is a crazy amount of people arriving. I get why the statue is such a symbol now, there must have been so many people coming past it hoping for a better life. The immigrants arriving in New York would have to first be inspected on Ellis Island, the government wanted to make sure they could support themselves, though only 2% of people arriving were refused entry. Which sounds pretty low, it feels like we allow in many fewer than 98% of people who apply for visas to immigrate nowadays.

As well as the immigration stuff, which was pretty interesting, there was also a bit on the history of the US as a whole. This was about the only museum we found in the whole time we were in New York which actually dealt with the history of the country. There is one thing I remember about this part of the museum, perhaps because it was so harrowing. I had never heard about the Trail of Tears before visiting this place. There was a bit of hoopla in the US lately because they wanted to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 note, replacing Andrew Jackson, and there seemed to be some opposition to this.

Which is incredible when you learn about this Andrew Jackson guy. Apparently he owned 100s of slaves and was the main advocate of the forced relocation policy for the American Indians. It was this policy which led to the Trail of Tears, and we learned about the Cherokee removal in particular. This seemed especially sad, as they were actually using the institutions of the US to protect their land and rights. The supreme court had even agreed with them, saying the individual states couldn't infringe on their rights, but this Andrew Jackson refused to uphold the Supreme Court's ruling and allowed the Cherokee to be forcibly removed. This ended up being something of a death march, with thousands of people dying.

Once I learned this it was very weird to hear so many people defending his position on the note, especially since Harriet Tubman seemed such a hero in comparison.