My Musings: Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island

During our first full day in New York, we covered a lot of ground! We saw the Statue of Liberty and climbed to the top of the crown, we toured through Ellis Island, we saw the new Oculus aka the World Trade Center, visited the 9/11memorial and walked across the Brooklyn Bridge. Whew! It was an awesome day!

We began the day by sailing to Liberty Island to visit Lady Liberty.

I loved that they had a giant floating screen showing the Women's World Cup matches

These two buddies are just the cutest. Sweet James trying to smile for the camera even though the sun was so bright. Thomas is still patching 2 hours a day to strengthen his right eye, he is a rockstar.

The view from the pedestal! If you choose to start taking the stairs from the base of the pedestal up to the crown, you will climb 336 stairs, Ricky and a couple of the boys choose this option. Karin, the rest of the boys and I chose to take the elevator to the top of the pedestal, so we only had to climb 162 stairs to the crown.

There are only a limited number of tickets to the crown available everyday and they need to be bought quite a bit in advance. Karin was amazing and was able to get us all tickets months before our trip!

The staircase to the crown is extremely narrow and tightly wound, it could actually make you dizzy if you ran up them quickly.

The stairs were fairly steep, but the main struggle the day we went was the heat, it was over 100 degrees inside the statue. The heat combined with the close quarters of the staircase made for a pretty claustrophobic experience. But it was only 162 stairs, so it went by pretty quickly.

We made it to the top! The inside of the crown was smaller than I thought it would be, our group of 8 took up most of the space. There were two rangers up there helping with guest questions, they told us they had to be switched out every two hours because the heat was so intense they couldn't be up there any longer than that. It was definitely a hot, hot day.

It was so cool to see the Statue of Liberty from such a unique perspective. We got close up views of her hands, her book and the bottom of her torch.

There are two staircases woven together, one for going up and one for going down. Since they are such narrow staircases, there is no way guests could pass each other going in opposite directions.

Once we finished our tour of the crown, we strolled through the small museum located in the pedestal. I learned that the Statue of Liberty was dedicated EXACTLY 100 years before I was born. It was dedicated on October 28, 1886 and I was born on October 28, 1986! What an awesome event with which to share my birthday!

After our time in the statue, we bought large glasses of refreshing lemonade and drank them as fast as possible. We spent quite a bit of time exploring the different gift shops, the boys were excited to find keepsakes from their first trip to Liberty Island.

Then we caught the ferry and sailed from Liberty Island to Ellis Island. I hadn't ever visited this historic place before, so I was excited to add a new New York experience to my list.

Ellis Island opened in 1892 as an immigration station, a purpose it served for more than 60 years until it closed in 1954. Located at the mouth of Hudson River between New York and New Jersey, Ellis Island saw millions of newly arrived immigrants pass through its doors. It has been estimated that close to 40 percent of all current U.S. citizens can trace at least one of their ancestors to Ellis Island.

From 1900 to 1914—the peak years of Ellis Island’s operation—some 5,000 to 10,000 people passed through the immigration station every day. Approximately 80 percent successfully passed through in a matter of hours, but others could be detained for days or weeks.

When Ellis Island opened, a great change was taking place in U.S. immigration. Fewer arrivals were coming from northern and western Europe—Germany, Ireland, Britain and the Scandinavian countries—as more and more immigrants poured in from southern and eastern Europe.

Among this new generation were Jews escaping from political and economic oppression in czarist Russia and eastern Europe (some 484,000 arrived in 1910 alone) and Italians escaping poverty in their country. There were also Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Serbs, Slovaks and Greeks, along with non-Europeans from Syria, Turkey and Armenia.

The reasons they left their homes in the Old World included war, drought, famine and religious persecution, and all had hopes for greater opportunity in the New World.

There are so many exhibits to view and learn from on Ellis Island, we only had enough time for a quick, partial walk through. It's a fascinating place.