Liberty Belle

Liberty Belle
She's still holding a torch in New York Harbor.
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Thursday, December 20, 2001 12:01 a.m. EST

This is a day to celebrate the Statue of Liberty. As she lifts her lamp to light the world, there may be no more compelling universal symbol of New York, of America, of freedom itself. In the words of the Emma Lazarus poem, her name is "Mother of Exiles." On Sept. 11, Lady Liberty herself was exiled for a time, cut off from visitors, closed for security reasons, with ferry access from lower Manhattan "suspended until further notice."

No longer. Though there are plans for tight security checks, and no entry till next year to the interior of the statue, as of today we may again board the ferry to Liberty Island, where the statue stands--measuring 305 feet, 1 inch from foundation to torch. And though there is not much to do there beyond visiting these symbolically freighted grounds, it feels like an important visit to make. Lady Liberty is both a mighty beacon and an old friend.

As sometimes happens with old friends, there have been spells when I've lived and worked within hailing distance of her, and paid little notice. There have also been times when it was clearly important to go there--starting way back in the spring of 1965, when I went to New York with one of my sisters to visit our grandmother. It was the year of the World's Fair, but that was just one of the thrills. For a week the three of us traveled all over New York. We went to the ballet, we toured Rockefeller Center, we went to Coney Island and ate cotton candy and clams by the beach.

Yet of all these joys, what endured as a landmark in my own life was the Statue of Liberty, a monument that had special meaning to my grandmother, as she explained while we took the ferry toward Liberty Island, across the harbor. My grandmother was an immigrant. She had first seen this harbor when she was a child, her immigrant family arriving from Eastern Europe just after the turn of the century. They had traveled steerage across the Atlantic, daring a complete change of world for the chance to become Americans.

My sister and I came away from that 1965 trip to New York in possession of little souvenir replicas of the Statue of Liberty. Mine has long since disappeared. But for Americans, with or without miniature reminders handy, Lady Liberty is a constant presence. We all get the basic story in grade school. You can find it now on plenty of Web sites. She was a gift to the people of the United States from the people of France, and was designed and built by the French sculptor August Bartholdi and the architect and engineer Alexandre Gustave Eiffel. Shipped from France in 350 pieces, the statue was assembled where she now stands, in New York Harbor, in 1886.

Americans generally treat her--much as we tend to treat our own freedoms, for which she stands--with a mix of reverence and careless familiarity. Along with turning out the little statues, in many sizes and hues, the souvenir industry of New York has churned out over the years Statue of Liberty plates, mugs, neckties, playing cards, pocket watches and those ubiquitous green foam-rubber crowns that tourists don year round and New Yorkers favor mainly on Halloween. There have been Statue of Liberty balloons and--of course--a Statue of Liberty Barbie. This year, amid the resurgent love of country, a huge Statue of Liberty was the lead float in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade down Broadway. The lady has turned up as everything from vertical terrain for an SUV in a current TV ad to a mighty backdrop in the movie "Working Girl" to a shattered prop in the closing scene of "Planet of the Apes."

But that's only part of the picture. I cannot forget the day in Beijing, in 1989, when protesters in Tiananmen Square kept faith with the universal human love of freedom, building their own Goddess of Liberty--modeled on our statue. After the communist government's tanks mowed that Chinese statue down, small plaster versions turned up for sale in what was then the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong. I keep one in my study, a sister to our own American statue, and a reminder that when China's people had the fleeting chance to signal their true desires, this is what they built.

And then there was the view of the original statue itself, from The Wall Street Journal's Manhattan offices on Liberty Street--a place that has been off-limits since the Sept. 11 collapse of the neighboring Twin Towers. The Journal moved into those offices from nearby Cortlandt Street in early 1986, the year Lady Liberty turned 100. There was a big restoration of the statue completed that summer, in time for New York to throw a huge party in her honor on July 4. At the Journal, many of us gathered that evening to watch the celebratory fireworks over the harbor and drink a toast to Liberty. It was glorious. The following month I left to spend a decade overseas, first in Asia and then in Russia, reporting on many unfree countries--places in which I heard people again and again wondering what it would take before they, too, might be free.

I have a souvenir of the centennial, and it means more with each new bit of history, not least today's reopening of Liberty Island. Back in that summer of 1986, my father gave me a sugar spoon with the Statue of Liberty engraved on the handle--though I am not by habit a collector of souvenir tableware. I can still hear his words today: "I want you to have this so you will always remember that when your great-grandmother first saw that statue, she had tears in her eyes."

Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Thursdays on OpinionJournal.com and in The Wall Street Journal Europe as "Letter From America."