Statue of Liberty / Ellis Island

The Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island are national monuments of transcendent importance, fraternal twins celebrating America’s immigrant history. The Statue of Liberty embodies the ideal, the welcome extended to “the huddled masses yearning to breathe free” immortalized in Emma Lazarus’s poem chiseled in its base, while Ellis Island embodies the real, the gritty, difficult, miraculous place where millions of immigrants from all corners of the globe entered the New World. Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi was the sculptor of the Statue of Liberty, Alexandre Gustave Eiffel its engineer, and Richard Morris Hunt the architect of its base from 1871-86, while Boring and Tilton were the architects of Ellis Island. From 1892 to 1953, as many as 10,000 immigrants in a day, some 12 million in all, exhausted from weeks of ocean travel in often hideous conditions, lined up for the inspection that determined whether they would enter the New World or be sent back home. Today, one hundred million Americans can trace some part of their family history through Ellis Island, and both the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island’s main building have been stunningly restored through the vision of the National Parks Service and the fundraising efforts of the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation.

New York, New York · United States