People On The Liberty Island Ferry in 1976

In 1976, Bill Antin was riding the Liberty Island ferry that connects Manhattan to Liberty Island in New York City. Were you? If this is you or someone you recognise in these pictures, please get in touch. We’d love to hear from you. For the rest of us, let’s imagine the stories between…

 

Liberty Island is where you can see the Statue of Liberty up close. The statue was devised in 1865 by Frenchman Édouard de Laboulaye as a gift from the people of France to the people of the United States. Sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi designed the statue known as Liberty Enlightening the World. His work contains symbolic parts: the crown represents light with the spikes evoking the sun’s rays; the tablet she holds is inscribed with July 4, 1776 in Roman numerals, noting American independence from Britain (1976 was America’s Bicentennial year); and the broken shackle and chains mark the abolition of slavery.

Architect Richard Morris Hunt was selected to design the Statue’s granite pedestal 1884. On it you can read those words written by Emma Lazarus (born July 22, 1849 – Nov. 19, 1887), a Jewish New Yorker whose ancestors fled the Inquisition. She called her poem The New Colossus:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “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!”