The Harbor's Open Hand

Polly crossed the harbor low, over gray water scored with ferry wakes, until the whole scene arranged itself around one raised arm. The Statue of Liberty stands on her own small island near the harbor mouth, facing out to open sea rather than in toward the city behind her, a crown of seven spikes on her head and a torch lifted high above the water.

Up close the surface is not solid at all. The whole standing figure is built from copper sheets no thicker than two coins stacked together, hammered thin and bolted onto an iron skeleton designed by the same engineer who would later build a tower in Paris. Weather has turned that copper a pale green, the color the metal settles into once it has been outside long enough, and it started life the color of a new coin.

She was a gift, finished in France and shipped across the ocean in pieces inside more than two hundred crates, then bolted back together on this island and given to the harbor in eighteen eighty-six. From the torch to the ground below her feet, she stands three hundred and five feet tall, tall enough that ships far out at sea used to sight the torch before they sighted the coast.

A short stretch of water away sits a second, smaller island, where more than twelve million people once stepped off boats and into new lives, one at a time, through halls built to hold whole ships' worth of people at once. Polly circled the harbor once more, then turned her wings toward the tall buildings crowding the skyline beyond, and flew in low over the water to meet them.