Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty (35 page)

Bartholdi looked over the goods that bore his trademark. “Very charming,” he said, examining the miniatures and medallions.

Stone and King were positioned at the end of the pier, and escorted Bartholdi up to the fort’s entrance. The sun had burned off the fog. The bright copper statue loomed boldly. On her pedestal, she was over 300 feet high. The statue of Arminius in Westphalia, Germany, the next-biggest sculpture in the world, at only 177 feet on its pedestal, would look like a miniature next to Liberty.

Bartholdi gazed up at the folds of his red metal colossus. (She would not be green for some forty years.) He paced the pedestal base with a blank expression. He had first conceived his “big daughter” before 1869 for the khedive of Egypt. Now, seventeen years later, here she stood.

Finally, he said, “I am very much pleased. It is a grand sight. I was very anxious about the formation of some of the lines. It is a success.”

De Lesseps loved the statue, too. The old white-haired visionary even climbed the scaffolding to get a better look.

Despite the group’s joyful mood, the statue was by no means completed. On all four sides of the pedestal, on each side of the doorways, the stone disks meant to show the arms of the United States and of France remained blank. Empty too were the forty medallions for the coat of arms of each of the states. Four large panels, more than twenty-three feet long and more than five feet high, still waited inscriptions and designs. As it would turn out, none of these would be complete for the unveiling (nor over a hundred years hence).

Bartholdi walked into the cool tunnel of the pedestal and up the central flight of wooden stairs. No elevator had been built yet. He climbed to the place where the shaded balconies would be. “This mass,” he said, touching the wall, “is tremendous.” He examined a joint. “And the work too is superb. It is like the work of the old Egyptians, and I only hope it may last as long.”

With Butler, he climbed farther into the statue’s metal interior. The staircase wound up and up, through the neck to the head. At the armpit, one could climb up metal steps that wove through the iron truss work to the torch. In the darkened interior, long lines of perforation still marked the copper sheathing—the unfilled rivet holes like beads of light. Bartholdi glanced around in that echoing cavern, at the seams and rivets, then slowly descended. “I believe that it will last until eternity,” he murmured.

It was now a gorgeous day. Tototte begged a piece of granite from the chief carpenter to bring back to her brother in France. He obliged and bestowed a few more samples on the military visitors and on Bartholdi himself.

“When I first came to America,” Bartholdi told a reporter, “I said to myself, ‘What a great thing it would be for this enormous statue to be placed in the midst of such a scene of life and liberty!’ My dream has been realized. I can only say that I am enchanted. This thing will live to eternity . . .”

He stared up to the sky as he finished his thought: “when we shall have passed away, and everything living with us has moldered away.”

A reporter asked if it was true that he would be made commander of the Legion of Honor because of his achievement. “I cannot say,” he replied, smiling, “though I hear rumors to that effect.” Unable to help himself, he listed his past honors: “I have been a chevalier of the Legion of Honor for twenty-two years and officer for five years. I first received the cross for my monument to Admiral Bruat, in 1864, and was promoted officer in connection with my work on the Lion of Belfort, in 1881.”

Earlier in the day, Napoleon Ney, a member of the French delegation, had remarked, “It may be said that this is the opening of Mr. Bartholdi’s Suez Canal. It is the greatest day of his life.”

On the boat back to New York Harbor, Bartholdi elaborated on his favorable impressions of the statue to a reporter. “I had feared that some little miscalculation or error might creep in, but I see that the work stands as I meant it should. There is not the slightest room for any criticism on my part, and the only suggestion which I should offer is that the approaches to the ramparts be so graded and terraced as to counteract the excessive height of which the walls of the fort now seem to rise. As they appear at present they seem a little too marked to be in proportion with the statue, otherwise the work and surroundings are in perfect harmony.”

Someone on deck shouted down that the Brooklyn Bridge was coming into view. With that, people grabbed their hats and hustled up on deck. The giant bridge loomed above, a web of iron floating hundreds of feet overhead. The Frenchmen must have marveled at what Americans could dream and build.

They had not shown quite the same talent for advance planning with regard to the Liberty inaugural. The finalizing of almost every aspect of the ceremony was late, including the search for a speaker. Chauncey M. Depew, attorney and railroad magnate, was one of the country’s most sought-after speechmakers and accepted the invitation to give the oration “under great pressure . . . because the time was so short, only a few days.”

Only on October 20 did Mayor William R. Grace declare the twenty-eighth a holiday and order the citizens to light up their houses. It was only two days before the celebration that the Board of Aldermen announced that public buildings should be decorated. One day before, the Board of Education decided to close public schools for the day. The New York Mercantile Exchange and the Consolidated Stock and Petroleum Exchange would be shut, too, as would the Custom House. French and American flags would be displayed on the Brooklyn Bridge.

In the days just before the unveiling, General Stone became so overwhelmed by the sudden clamor of people wishing to participate in his land and naval parades that he shut and locked his door so he could get the organizing done. The list of naval participants grew so long that one paper claimed three thousand ships—an impossible number—would take part.

It had rained without a stop for days leading up to the celebration. This was considered a positive development at first because a long drought had caused the New York air to fill with powdery dust. However, the rain poured down on the workmen trying to tear down the sodden old narrow steps leading to the fort to create a new stairway. City Hall and the Post Office displayed buntings and flags, which were promptly drenched. Few other public buildings even made an attempt. In the aerie on top of the Equitable Building, the signal officer read the wind and promised good weather for the twenty-eighth. It would be a bit cloudy, he said, but hopefully the weather would drive into the Atlantic, or, given its trek from the east, would be banished to the Poconos.

By Wednesday evening, crowds had poured into the city. Transit officials estimated that about fifty thousand more passengers than usual had arrived during the previous forty-eight hours. The city hadn’t seen such an influx of people since General Grant’s funeral in the summer of 1885. Grand Central Terminal expected a surge of additional passengers in the morning that would bring the total of visitors to about one hundred thousand. Police received word that an army of known pickpockets had planned to creep into the city to take advantage of the occasion. Cops were posted at the train station and other entryways to make arrests on the spot.

Dark clouds drifted in early Thursday morning, the day of the inaugural, October 28, 1886, driven by a stout wind blowing from the northeast. Warships were said to be out in the bay, but no one on land could make out their hulking forms. The fog was so thick that Liberty was invisible from the Brooklyn Bridge and the Battery.

Despite the dreary conditions, people kept arriving—from New Jersey, Staten Island, and Long Island; and by train, ferryboat, or horsecar—all moving toward the parade route on Broadway. Mobs of people walked along the bridge, often carrying big wooden boxes to stand on. Young people marching in military formation carried banners and played terrible music. Sprinkled throughout were red-shirted firefighters, and army men giving off the shiny flash of golden epaulettes.

Up on Fifth Avenue, elegantly dressed women and children crowded the mansions’ doorsteps. Passengers rode on top of stagecoaches in the rain just to glimpse their fellow citizens along the marching route.

Paving stones, which had been awaiting their use for the sidewalks on Fifth Avenue just above the Square, served as a perch for hundreds of men and boys. People clung to any ledge they could find, including the cup of a streetlamp. Men packed the rooftops.

In those hours of morning, creeping toward half past twelve when the parade would begin, one could hear the thunder of a drum being banged, or the blast of a trumpet. Wherever music sounded, crowds would cluster or people would rush to their stoops because the musical notes signaled revelry.

Many New Yorkers tried to make a few dollars off the event. Despite Bartholdi’s last-minute efforts to fight copyright infringements, souvenir sellers offered medals of Liberty, pictures of the Brooklyn Bridge, and lithographs of General Grant, which they sold as portraits of the sculptor. The Italian peanut vendors sold stoop space and shooed out their families, including mothers with babies, in an effort to make a few pennies. The soda water vendors, whose product was of no interest in the cold weather, hired out their cylinders as seats for five cents apiece. The bigger shops cleared out their windows to make way for chairs and ladies to sit in them.

One newspaper noted that the vast numbers of Italians thronging the east side of Broadway from Spring Street to Bond might potentially alarm older citizens because they revealed the dramatic demographic shifts that had happened in the last ten years. By the end of the decade, 80 percent of the city’s population would be either foreign-born or of foreign parentage.

The rain began to fall more heavily. General Stone waited in that downpour on horseback outside 2 West Fifty-Seventh Street, the home of Secretary of the Navy William C. Whitney. Stone wore his full military uniform and had tended to his white mustache, pageboy, and beard, ready to lead the parade of thirty thousand. His large staff would follow behind him and the Old Guard, headed by the Thirteenth Regiment and drum corps, then the president himself.

At 10 a.m., President Cleveland waddled out of Secretary Whitney’s house, along with Secretary of State Thomas C. Bayard. The president clutched a closely rolled umbrella. He wore a tightly buttoned frock coat and black silk hat, and was less stout than the public might have been led to expect from the era’s political cartoons. A reporter would note that on his right cheek he had a small cut, which he had made shaving in an unfamiliar mirror. This was considered only his second public appearance since the presidential campaign season began, albeit two years prior to the actual election.

With Stone on his white charger at the lead, the group began rolling down Fifth Avenue to Waverly Place, where the president’s viewing platform had been built. All the buildings on the route were fringed with the Stars and Stripes. The Signal Corps, up on the rooftops, lofted white flags and sent the message down the line to the Battery: the president is coming!

Both sides of the avenue surged with people, waving their hats, roaring, and applauding. The president’s carriage is passing!

Meanwhile, the marchers fell into line, starting at Fifty-Seventh Street. The tens of thousands of soldiers, firefighters, flower girls, students, and bricklayers would head to Waverly Place, then east to Broadway and follow it south until they came to Park Row. At that point they would veer off Broadway to march by Pulitzer’s building, which was decorated with French and American flags, and buntings unfurled from the sills.

Outside his office, Pulitzer had built an arch that spanned the entire street. Reminiscent of the Arc de Triomphe and decorated with flags, it rose high above the trolleys and horse-drawn carriages. It was crafted of greenery and swags of vines, and on it were written these words:

L
A
B
ELLE
F
RANCE
T
HE
U
NITED
S
TATES

V
IVE
L
’
ENTENTE
FRATERNELLE
DES
DEUX
RÉPUBLIQUES
.

At the top, Pulitzer had crafted the masthead of the
World
in three dimensions. Between the two globes stood a replica of the Statue of Liberty.

When Cleveland arrived at the Waverly grandstand, the police raised their billy clubs to fend off the surge from the spectators who were thrilled to see their president.

Cleveland and his cabinet climbed the steps, joining the thousand dignitaries already waiting. The French honorees were in full military dress, sashes, and plumes. Eugene Spuller, the politician who had escaped Paris with Gambetta in the balloon during the 1870 siege, was there, as was the burly General Schofield, draped with what seemed excessive amounts of sashing and medals.

A tremendous cheer swept the crowd as the president and Bartholdi shook hands. People farther back took up the huzzahs and carried the shout far beyond the point where anyone could tell what they were cheering for.

The dignitaries had barely settled when from the north came the dark blue and red and gold of the thirty thousand marchers on their way to salute the president. The Seventh Regiment was the first to strike up the Marseillaise. The French pulled off their hats and shouted, “Bravo!”