MONDAY 16 SEPTEMBER: STATUE OF LIBERTY and THE GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM

No trip to New York is complete without a trip to see the Statue of Liberty, so on Monday morning we set off for the 10 am cruise.
Even before you get to South Ferry you can see the Statue standing out on the horizon ....

.....and Ellis Island, the former arrival point for over 12 million immigrants to the US.
Sue had been particularly looking forward to spending time at the Ellis Island Museum of Immigration finding out what she could about her aunt Mary Agnes and the other Hanafees and Farrells who had settled in America. Unfortunately Ellis Island is currently closed so she had to make do with searching the Ellis Island website.

This was our first chance to view New York from the water.

And as we got closer we could understand the accounts of overwhelming emotions experienced by the immigrants, after long, arduous and often dangerous voyages, as they first saw the statue  (the figurehead of the American Dream) and their new home.

'Give me your tired, your poor. Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door.'

 ('The New Colossus' by American Jewish poet Emma Lazarus, inscribed on a tablet on the pedestal.).

Measuring 350 feet from her pedestal, depicting Liberty throwing off her shackles and holding a beacon to light the world, the statue is the creation of French sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi. Actually originally intended for Alexandria in Egypt, the statue was built in Paris between 1874 and 1884: a construction of thin copper sheets bolted together and supported by an iron framework designed by Gustave Eiffel. It had to be taken apart into hundreds of pieces to be shipped to New York. Once there, it took 2 further years to be reassembled, the delay largely the result of problems raising the necessary funds. It's hard today to contemplate New York without it, but, such was the indifference to the project, it might never have been completed but for the efforts of newspaper magnate Joseph Pulitzer.

Before we climbed to the viewing balcony we spent some time in the museum with its prints, photos, posters and replicas.

The original torch and flame (completed first and used to raise funds for the rest of the statue).

Bartholdi was aware of the marketing opportunities of the statue from the start, and the chance to make a personal fortune, selling licences to use the statue's image.

The views from the balcony are superb.

At the top of the pedestal we looked up into the centre of the statue's skirts, glimpsing her riveted and bolted interior.

The new World Trade Centre now dominates the view. We could only imagine what it looked like before 9/11.

The Guggenheim Museum
Multi-storey car park or upturned beehive?
It's probably not the PC thing to say, but we were under-whelmed by the Guggenheim. Not by the building (designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and unveiled in 1959) but by the sparsity of exhibits. Perhaps we should have paid more heed to the guide books which warn us 'Whatever you may think of the collection .....'. Certainly, the Thannhauser Collection was the only room containing anything like more than a bare handful of paintings. It was also the only room full of viewers, so presumably we were not the only ones who felt short-changed.