The Harbor's Open Hand

Polly flew low over the harbor, past gray water and ferry wakes, until she saw one raised arm ahead. The Statue of Liberty stands on her own island near the harbor mouth. She faces the open sea, not the city behind her, with a crown of seven spikes and a torch held high.

Up close, the surface is thin. The whole statue is made of copper sheets no thicker than two coins stacked together, bolted onto a frame of iron built by an engineer who later built a tower in Paris. Rain and air turned the copper green. It started out the color of a new coin.

France finished the statue and sent it across the ocean in pieces, packed in more than two hundred crates. Workers bolted it back together here in eighteen eighty-six. From the torch to the ground, she stands three hundred and five feet tall. Ships far out used to see the torch before they saw land.

Close by sits a smaller island. More than twelve million people once stepped off boats there into new lives. Polly circled the harbor once, then flew toward the tall buildings ahead.