125 years old, still young and still hot. I love her. I love where she stands, I love her crown of radiant wisdom and her torch and her book of laws, I love Miss Lazarus’ poem, I love that she’s an excellent sculpture on her own terms. I love that you can buy bronze paperweights of her, and that she’s so familiar she can figure in cartoons and movies, in parts or in whole. I love that we fixed her up for another century (Bartholdi did a good job, but he (and Eiffel) didn’t know enough about electrolytic corrosion when you rivet copper onto a steel frame). I love the French for thinking the American experiment was their project, too.
Among the liberties she recalls today is freedom from broken bodies, ruined lungs, blindness, and the poverty industrial disability used to assure. Here is where she was made: a filthy, smoky hell worse than any of Piranesi’s dungeons: not a pair of goggles or steel-toed shoes in sight, and just walking across the floor could break your leg. Every breath put asbestos in your lungs. Imagine the noise: this was a metalsmithing factory with everyone banging on sheet metal with a hammer. Going up on the scaffold? Safety harness…what are you talking about? Just try not to break any equipment when you land; you, we can replace tomorrow.
That’s where everything was made back then. When she was restored in 1986, things were very different: for example, the workers had protection from Eiffel’s asbestos . Save a thought for OSHA, child labor laws, Social Security Disability insurance, and the unions who made it safe to go to work in the morning and make stuff for us.
Well, Bartholdi had to come up with a new rationale and source of funding for his statue when Egypt couldn’t come up with the loot to buy it.
Not all great ideas appear in their optimal form, or motivation, the first time out of the box
How typical was the dangerous slum of Eiffel’s workshop? The AEG Turbine Hall in Berlin, built 1910, was beautifully organized according to these (not very clear) photos. AEG was no doubt an exceptional employer. Here’s the Schneider ironworks in Le Creusot in 1881; not as good as AEG, but much better than Eiffel. Nobody’s wearing earmuffs a few feet from a drop forge.
Great post, Michael. I’m old enough to have made four Atlantic crossings by ocean liner. Liberty is impressive enough when viewed from the ferry, but to see her from shipboard as you return home after a long absence abroad is a whole ‘nother experience.
I believe it. Just seeing it looking back over your left shoulder driving out of the city on the Holland spur of the Turnpike is cool enough. And to think about what that statue meant, and the multiple layers of immigrants who have come and gone through New York City over the years, occupying one area or another and then moving on as they moved up and out, and leaving it to another group to try their luck. Much of that history is ugly and dirty (Triangle Shirtwaist, 4000 people per tenement block, etc. etc.), but much of it is inspiring and noble in its way (the Lower East Side of Manhattan has been at various times Dutch, Irish, German/Polish, Hungarian, Italian, Jewish, Hispanic, Asian, and more). It’s a palimpsest as rich as most any in the world, and forged in just a few centuries.