A lot has changed at the Statue of Liberty since September 11, 2001–and the demand that I remove my belt is just the surface manifestation of much of what we have lost since that day.
Perhaps you’re not even aware that the statue at the Statue of Liberty isn’t open. You can still take the ferry to Liberty Island ($10, thank you very much), but the statue itself has been shut “indefinitely,” according to the National Park Service.
After September 11, everyone knew that the famous “lamp beside the golden door”–as Emma Lazarus called it in that famous poem–would close for a time, if only to set up airport-style security checkpoints and sew some menacing eagles onto the security guards’ uniforms so that they resembled genuine guards, not rent-a-cops.
Well, “indefinitely” has turned out to be a long time. The security is in place (“OK, you can put your belt back on”), but you still can’t enter the statue, climb to the crown or even visit the museum (where you’d learn unpatriotic things like the fact that the French and the U.S. were once friends!). Don’t worry, though, the gift shop and snack bar are still open (we’re Americans, and some institutions are too vital to keep closed, even in the name of national security).
Even Lazarus’s famous poem–which is affixed to the base of the statue–is off-limits. Perhaps it should be re-written, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled tourists yearning for something to see…Let’s strip search and then not even let them inside of me!”
Something about this didn’t sit well with me. After all, if you’re already checking people for bombs, guns and exploding belts, why keep the statue shuttered? How much damage could a crazed tourist do with a 6-inch pewter replica of Lady Liberty?
I started asking questions that only I can ask (well, you could ask them, too, but I know the phone numbers of all the relevant press offices, so you might as well just let me handle it). My first call was to the Department of Homeland Security. After all, just last week, a Memphis judge convicted a 17-year-old boy of committing an act of terrorism because he bragged that he had weapons of mass destruction and intended to use them against the Statue of Liberty. Sure, federal authorities determined that “the threat was not viable,” according to The Associated Press, but who knows how many other, equally non-viable threats are being phoned in?
“I can’t answer that because it may be classified,” a Homeland Security spokeswoman told me. She promised to call back, but like so many women in my life, did not.
The National Park Service website said the closure was related to “improvements and ongoing construction upgrades.” So I asked spokeswoman Edie Shean-Hammond what that meant. “I can’t get into that except to say that there’s construction going on. I don’t want to give you a half-baked cake.”
When I pressed her for further details, she said that the “construction” involved “access and egress.” In fact, she used the words “access” and “egress” so many times that I felt that she didn’t really know what the words meant.
Apparently, all this secrecy centers around a mere $5 million. See, rather than just allocate $5 million out of the $864.5-quadrillion anti-terror budget, the federal government has asked private donors to fix the access and egress. This is pretty much how the federal government has always treated Lady Liberty. When the French gave us the statue, the government refused to pay for the pedestal on which to put it. So newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer (himself an immigrant) raised the money (a large portion of it from schoolkids chipping in nickels). And when the feds let the statue rot for the next 100 years, Lee Iacocca was summoned to raise the money for its crown-to-sandaled-feet renovation. So it should be no surprise that the federal government can’t even come up with a measly $5 million (which is just 2.2 million gallons of gas, if you’re buying it from Halliburton).
American Express has pledged $3 million and Folgers says it will chip in $1 million ($1 for every person who saves the foil seal from the new Folgers AromaSeal Canister and mails it back to Procter and Gamble. The generosity is already paying off; after all, before this article, had you even heard of the Folgers AromaSeal? Now you can’t live without it, admit it).
Regardless of the current lack of access and egress, I still took the 20-minute ferry ride to Liberty Island. Once there, I discovered that there’s really nothing to do except walk around the statue’s base and have someone take your picture. I found the whole experience the very opposite of the celebration of liberty that a trip to the statue is supposed to be.
So I made one more call, this time to Charlie DeLeo, who has spent his entire adult life working at the statue. Regular visitors know Charlie as “The Keeper of the Flame” because his main job was to maintain Liberty’s torch, changing lightbulbs, regilding it, whatever. (His other job, by the way, was to sneak reporters into the torch, which was one of the great thrills in my life.)
“The whole place is sad now,” DeLeo told me. “I’m used to seeing that statue filled with people learning about this monument to freedom. With no visitors, it’s lonely.”
DeLeo, like most New Yorkers, has a fatalistic, post-9/11 outlook on life. “You could die any minute of the day, so why think about it,” he said. “No one asked me, but I would’ve opened that statue 30 days after September 11–think about the symbolism of that!”
It would have been a better symbol than a guy demanding my belt.
