A Pair of American Islands

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Since April, crews have been working 18 hours a day on Liberty Island. The pitch seemed both unusually feverish and collaborative one bright, windy afternoon last week. There is no pushing back this Friday's deadline. Up in the statue's crown, a Mexican worker--an immigrant!--put finishing touches on new interior copper sheathing, while Project Architect John Robbins of the Park Service complimented the man on his finesse at riveting an eccentric, angular piece of metal.

Inside the statue, most of the angles are eccentric, which made the whole job appealing and difficult for the engineers. The copper skin had been fastened to the superstructure by means of more than 1,800 iron armature bars, all different shapes and sizes. At the rate of just twelve a day, the armatures have been replaced by individually forged steel bars. The exterior, blemished by acid rain and 100-year accretions of bird excrement, was bathed and scrubbed. Only two bits of grafting were necessary: the tip of the nose and some hair curls are new copper.

Ad hoc solutions were devised. The gloppy layers of interior paint were frozen off with a sprayed treatment of supercold liquid nitrogen. Bolts holding the statue to the pedestal, each fastened with a nut as big as a layer cake, were tightened with a 30-ton hydraulic jack. Only one radical renovation was undertaken: Liberty's torch is entirely new. The old handle had corroded badly, and the flame had been replaced in 1916 by a leaky, kitschy amber-glass contraption. (It is now on display in the new granite entrance lobby, designed by the firm of Swanke Hayden Connell.) Appropriately, twelve French artisans were imported to fashion a new torch. They needed a year to make a plywood mold, take a plaster cast of the wooden form, make a metal mold over which reinforcing concrete was poured, and finally fashion the repousse copper flame itself--then cover it in nearly a pound of 24-karat gold leaf.

From a visitor's point of view, the greatest change involves the 192-step walk up to the top. The old enclosing stair tower was replaced by a more open spiral, and the statue's copper interior has been illuminated. As a result, the upward passage through the dramatic, Gaudian space is now at least half the fun, intriguing and slightly mysterious.

From Architect John Burgee's pleasant new wooden Liberty Island pier, the trip over to Ellis Island takes just five minutes. The anxious immigrant's view toward Liberty must have been a bit ominous: the perspective from Ellis is of the statue's back, her cold shoulder. Of the 17 million who disembarked there, some 300,000 were deported, deemed medically or politically unfit to become Americans. Given the mass of people who passed through, though, Ellis Island's history is humane: 80% who arrived were in and out within a few hours. Yet today, roaming the decrepit, shadowy, once functional buildings, certain grim resonances are inescapable. These are Government buildings, after all, through which millions of Europeans were herded, bureaucratically categorized and judged.