The Lady in the Harbor
Also published in Columbia in 1986, this portrait of Lady Liberty graced the “College Walk” section of the magazine, modeled after Talk of the Town in The New Yorker. I was editor of College Walk and insisted on using third person plural … I remain fond of that narrative conceit.
At evening, looking across the water beneath an indigo sky, we try to recall her gaze, serene and compassionate. We think she is shy, hiding from us within a silver cocoon. She is a goddess, after all, capable of spectacular transformation, yet never changing. As a ship steams out of the Hudson, trailing no wake in the growing darkness, we watch it glide silently past her. Tonight she lifts no lamp to guide the way.
Nor will she until July 4, 1986, when her new torch will compete with fireworks to light up her centennial. Except for the torch, Liberty will not look very different for all of two years’ renovation. Her copper drapery has weathered well, the verdigris offering extra protection against pollution, so it will receive only a gentle cleansing with mild detergents.
The hard work is going on inside the statue. To see some of it, we took a day trip to Liberty Island to talk with engineer Edward Cohen. “We talk about all this among ourselves as ‘major surgery on the Grand Old Lady,’ ” Cohen tells us as we walk up a curved wooden ramp to Liberty’s scaffolding. “We’re improving the pulmonary and respiratory systems, even doing a little plastic surgery, too.” As managing partner of Ammann and Whitney, consulting engineers, Cohen coordinates an international team of architects and engineers helping the National Park Service restore our favorite monument.
Her proper name is “Liberty Enlightening the World.” France presented her to the United States as an expression of the “ancient friendship” between the two nations, to borrow a phrase from her creator, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi. But the inspiration to build the statue belonged to a scholar, not an artist.
France, 1865. Napoleon III (following in the footsteps of his uncle) had turned the Second Republic into the Second Empire; his autocratic regime had turned popular sentiment back to republicanism. In their lachrymose mood, the French sympathized with a wounded United States mending from civil war and a president’s assassination. Especially one Édouard de Laboulaye, legal scholar, historian, intellectual. Bartholdi, commissioned to sculpt a bust of Laboulaye, became enraptured by his subject’s idea of erecting a colossal monument to independence so dear to the French, but so elusive.
“Bartholdi had a lifelong craving for gigantomania,” art critic John Russell explains. “Too late for the Colossus of Rhodes, he was just in time for the wave of very large standing figures that swept across Europe in the nineteenth century.” The sculptor had traveled in Egypt during the 1850s, admiring the pyramids and the magnificent tombs along the Nile. He later proposed a lighthouse à la Laboulaye for the Suez Canal, in the form of a woman holding high a torch, symbolizing the West handing civilization to the East.
But as the nineteenth century progressed, it seemed rather that the New World was enlightening the Old. “I will try to glorify the Republic and Liberty over there,” Bartholdi wrote to Laboulaye before voyaging westward, “in the hope that someday I will find it again here.” In the United States, Bartholdi found more than liberty—he discovered Bedloe’s Island, twelve floating acres southwest of Manhattan, on which to set his statue. Where celebrate democracy if not right in the cast of the world’s melting pot?
As if on cue, the French ushered in the Third Republic and adopted a constitution. Laboulaye announced the Franco-American Union to raise funds for the monument, and Bartholdi began to build it. Directing a team of craftsmen in the yards of Baget, Gauthier and Co., the sculptor painstakingly enlarged his plaster models, each time taking nine thousand measurements to keep the proportions right, until he had created, indeed, his 151-foot colossus. Wooden molds were built over the plaster, and craftsmen hammered the copper sheets, in repoussé, into the molds.
To make certain that his grand creation would not collapse into New York’s brackish harbor, Bartholdi enlisted the genius of Alexandre Gustave Eiffel (who would soon afterward construct the tower in Paris). The engineer designed a network of some sixteen hundred iron bars contoured to Liberty’s shape and attached to her by slip joints in copper saddles. This armature was connected by trusswork to Liberty’s spine, a central pylon of four iron piers encasing the famous stairway to her crown. Eiffel’s simple but ingenious structure placed the load of copper sheathing (only 3/32-inch thick but weighing one hundred tons) on the pylon while allowing it to give with wind and temperature.
Over the years, leaks and condensation caused a galvanic reaction between the iron bars and copper saddles, Cohen explains. The rusted armature warped. Rivets popped (we can see sunlight streaming through holes in her gown). “We were reluctant to make any drastic changes,” Cohen tells us as we watch workmen replacing the old iron bars with new ones made of low-carbon stainless steel. “The way the contractor is doing it is very interesting. They’ve made plastic molds of the bars in place for accurate configuration. When these harden, braced sheet-metal templates are built to guide the fabrication of the bars themselves.” An elaborate schedule allows for only four bars to be removed at any one time, all from different sides and levels of the statue.
Seven layers of paint have been “frozen” off Liberty’s inner surface with liquid nitrogen. A final layer of coal-tar paint, used as a sealant between the copper sheets, is being blasted off with bicarbonate of soda. After the screen surrounding the pylon is torn down, visitors will see all of Eiffel’s work against a pristine copper backdrop.
About 1.8 million visitors ferry from Battery Park to Liberty Island each year; Bartholdi had designed a lighthouse intended for a few custodians who would keep the beacon shining. With as many as eighty-five hundred people passing through the statue on a busy day, ventilation had been a problem. “The carbon dioxide levels get very high from people breathing, and temperatures at the crown platform get up to about one hundred and twenty degrees in the summer,” says Cohen, “but you can’t air condition a copper can with no insulation.” Ammann and Whitney have devised a system to draw in fresh air at the statue’s base, send it up through ducts along the pylon, and blow it onto the stairs and viewing area inside the crown. The engineers have also consulted with project architects and historians on how to improve the traffic flow inside the pedestal, which becomes congested with hot tourists.
The Pedestal has its own story. France appealed to its citizens for money to build the statue, America was to raise funds for its stand. A committee formed to solicit a quarter of a million dollars. By the time Bartholdi had erected his masterpiece and presented it to the U.S. ambassador to France in 1884, Americans had contributed only enough money to lay a concrete base (inside the walls of Fort Wood, built on Bedloe’s Island in 1811). The drive stalled as Liberty, disassembled and packed away in two-hundred-odd crates, awaited shipment from Rouen.
Enter Joseph Pulitzer. On the day he bought the New York World in 1883, the paper ran an item about the pedestal committee’s latest fund-raising scheme. One of the new publisher’s first editorials excoriated the apathetic rich for neglecting the noble gift and appealed to “the poorer classes” to respond to a popular subscription of “one dollar and upwards” for the pedestal. “The essence of Pulitzer policy,” wrote World city editor James Wyman Barrett, “the heart and soul of it, is to discover some public good that can be achieved and then work toward the accomplishment of that good.”
Having turned the floundering World into New York’s liveliest daily, Pulitzer ran a second editorial on the pedestal problem in 1885. “It would be an irrevocable disgrace to New York City and the American Republic to have France send us this splendid gift without our having provided even so much as a landing place for it,” cried the World. “Let us not wait for the millionaires to give this money. It is not a gift from the millionaires of France to the millionaires of America, but a gift of the whole people of France to the whole people of America.”
Pulitzer made a campaign of it. From March to August, 121,000 people gave over $100,000. All ages responded: “Please receive from two little boys one dollar for the pedestal. It is our savings.… The enclosed dollar comes from a party of poor artists who dined on University Place this evening.… A lonely and very aged woman with very limited means wishes to add her mite to the Bartholdi fund.”
Architect Richard Morris Hunt designed the eighty-nine-foot pedestal, and General Charles P. Stone engineered what was then the largest mass concrete job on earth. The World commented on the granite facing, suggesting that the pedestal could hardly be more “close-grained” than New York millionaires. The statue, which had arrived in New York on the warship Isere, was reassembled on her foundation and welcomed officially by President Grover Cleveland on October 8, 1886. “It is as I wished,” said Bartholdi.
Renovation of the pedestal will allow us to sense something of Bartholdi’s satisfaction. Floors and stairs added later are being demolished, opening space for a glass-walled double-decker elevator to carry us up to the statue. A new “mezzanine” near the top of the pedestal will permit less ambitious sightseers to view Liberty’s skeleton without climbing the 171 steps to her crown.
Other repairs: Liberty’s corroded torch flame is being replaced by one of gilded copper. We watched workmen building a plaster flame, from which a mold will be made, into which copper will be hammered and shaped, just as Bartholdi did it. Bartholdi was never happy with his torch. He had windows cut into the copper and lights installed for the 1886 dedication. Further attempts to brighten the flame (even a skylight was added) proved ineffectual until Gutzon Borglum, the Mount Rushmore sculptor, cut the copper into a lattice to hold yellow cathedral glass. The glass let out light, but the lattice let in water, deteriorating the iron structure.
Liberty’s fatigued right arm will be braced. Either the sheathing was damaged in transit or Bartholdi changed his mind, but when the statue was reassembled her raised arm tilted forward an additional eighteen inches. Its altered position put a crick in Liberty’s neck and shoulder. “In a restoration of this type, because it was built with these defects, we felt it was all a part of Liberty’s history,” says Cohen. “We decided that we should reinforce instead of replace. After all, it’s stood for one hundred years.” We asked Cohen how long Liberty will stand after these repairs and refurbishments. “All the studies concluded that the statue might have a problem from fatigue in about two thousand years!”
Everyone speaks in hyperbole when evoking our national goddess. The facts encourage it. From foot to flame she measures 151 feet. She weighs over 225 tons. Her right arm is forty-two feet long, her hand sixteen, her index finger eight. Her fingernails are over a foot long. Her new elevator will offer the highest hydraulic ride in the world. Her very theme is monumental: liberty, independence, freedom. Her diadem of seven rays shines hope across seven seas and seven continents.
“More than one hundred million Americans have relations who first saw America by sailing past the Statue of Liberty on their way to Ellis Island,” says Lee A. Iacocca, chairman of the Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Centennial Commission, which intends to raise $230 million to restore both monuments. Seventeen million immigrants … their introduction to America a copper colossus holding a tablet inscribed July IV, MDCCLXXVI.
Amid this migration to the New World, a less conspicuous plaque was placed on Liberty, inscribed with the final lines of a sonnet entitled “The New Colossus.” Originally published in Pulitzer’s paper, the poem was written by a young woman, one of seven children born to Portuguese-Jewishparents in New York City, who wrote in seven languages. When her rabbi asked Emma Lazarus to accompany him to Wards Island, where forty thousand immigrants had found refuge from persecution, she was appalled by the squalor engulfing their lives. Impressed by the persistence and vitality of the people, she badgered leaders of industry to help them find work. Up to then a timid and sentimental poet, she took on a fiery ardor as a woman who had found her cause and her voice:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
Joseph Pulitzer, a frail seventeen-year-old Austrian when he immigrated to the United States to fight in the Civil War, was the perfect patron for Liberty. And Liberty, Pulitzer made sure, became a patron for the World. He added her likeness to his paper’s masthead, and when circulation of the Sunday edition reached a quarter-million (largest in the nation) he embossed her on a silver medal. Finally, he enshrined her in his monolith—the Pulitzer Building.
As the World was enjoying “unparalleled journalistic growth,” Pulitzer celebrated his forty-first birthday by paying $630,000 in cash for French’s Hotel, at Park Row and Frankfort Street. “The site stood on historic ground where the first fight for liberty, unavailing though it was, occurred in the British Colonies of North America,” wrote Don Seitz, Pulitzer’s right hand at the World. A Captain Jacob Leisler had been hanged at Park Row and Frankfort for the crime of treason when, against King William’s wishes, he declared himself lieutenant-governor of a “liberated” New Amsterdam. But Park Row and Frankfort had a more personal meaning for Pulitzer. As a poor and callow veteran, still dressed in Union blues and looking for a shoeshine, he had been roundly snubbed in the lobby of French’s Hotel.
The Pulitzer Building was the tallest in Manhattan (“in the world,” bragged the World). Its gold dome competed with Liberty’s torch as a landmark for mariners; from inside, it offered a panoramic view of the city. Unfortunately for Pulitzer, failing eyesight and a chronic nervous condition (his biographer W. A. Swanberg described him as manic-depressive) forced him into early retirement; he missed the dedication of his building in 1890, and was to visit it only three times.
But it was “a splendid pile,” the always quotable World declared. Pulitzer spent two million dollars on the twenty-six-story Venetian Renaissance skyscraper, replete with elaborately carved columns, arches and spandrels. “I want to be sure that no false economy or niggardliness will mar the building inside,” he wrote from Paris during one of his health tours. The rotunda was paved in white marble; its pilasters were pink marble; its wainscotting rouge jasper. There were frescoed ceilings, embossed-leather walls and brass fixtures. He also commissioned a stained-glass rendering of the paper’s logo—Liberty shining between two faces of the globe—by artists Otto Heinigke and Oliver Phelps Smith. The milky colored glass radiates “an incorruptible American optimism,” writes art critic John Russell. We can speak about this piece of the Pulitzer Building in the present tense, for when the skyscraper was torn down in 1955 to make way for an entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge, the stained glass was saved and installed in Pulitzer’s last legacy, Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism.
“The World Room has something of style in it,” says William Tracy, associate dean, as he escorts us to the third floor of the building. “It has a little something of the past.” He introduces us to photographer Victor Boswell of National Geographic who, camera in hand, balances precariously atop a step ladder. Boswell is photographing our Liberty for a book on the history of immigration to America, the proceeds to go to the Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Foundation. Installed above a mantel in the west wall, the stained glass commands the room and seems to glow of itself.
“The concept is very simple,” says Anthony Gallardo, associate engineer with the university’s facilities operations, who enters the room in a dashing trenchcoat and charms us with his soft Italian accent. “Stained glass has to be treated as a transparency, providing different levels and intensities of illumination.” We asked Gallardo, the campus lighting expert, to show us how he illuminated the glass. He took us through a little door in the side of the mantel, where we could see the props behind the illusion.
“The window used to be lighted by nineteen 150-watt R40 floodlights,” he begins, “which each produced two thousand lumens.” (A lumen, he explains, is a unit of brilliance, or luminescence. An ordinary table lamp gives off about 1,250 lumens.) “So we had a total of about thirty-eight thousand lumens. I replaced those bulbs with eight-foot fluorescent tubes, four each in trays that run across the window. Each of these tubes produce fourteen thousand lumens, so we now have a total of 112,000 lumens!”
We back out to look at the now shining Liberty from the right side. “It’s a warm white light,” he says, “and it came out so beautiful. It looks like the sun is going down in the southwest, and it’s reflected in the folds of the gown of Miss Liberty and in the clouds above her.” He grows emphatic. “A symbol of America, liberty for all!”
This stained glass has special meaning for Gallardo, who came to the United States from Italy after traveling around the world as a ship’s electrician. “Back in June 15, 1947, coming into the harbor, was the first time I saw the statue,” he says, “with its torch illuminating freedom for everybody. What an impressive sight!” He returned with his wife in 1952, taking a job as an electrician’s helper at the New York Stock Exchange while attending English classes. “I learned to read English from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass,” he recalls, and he recites a few lines from memory.
Later he enrolled at Pratt Institute to study design, lighting and commercial electronics, commuting long hours between his home in Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx and the school in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. After graduating, he went to work för the American Museum of Natural History, designing lighting for its façade as well as for its exhibits inside. He continued to study while working hard and gaining experience, and eventually reached the top of his field—New York City Master Electrician—before coming to Columbia, where he once studied English. “Few people have been as lucky as I have been in my life,” he says. “You can be very successful by observing the three basic assumptions of the United States: supply and demand, competition and free enterprise.”
In the darkened World Room, we stand quietly admiring his magic—Liberty looks alive—thinking how right some things turn out. Gallardo, one of the millions of immigrants welcomed to America by her torch, has rekindled her spirit with his own special light. We can’t decide which will glow brightest—Liberty’s new torch, Pulitzer’s stained glass, or Gallardo’s smile.