Climbing to the Crown of the Statue of Liberty

The Statue of Liberty has stood as a beacon in New York Harbor since 1886. One hundred and forty years. It’s watched as hundreds of thousands of people have made their way to NYC, as the city has transformed from an industrial immigrant gateway into a global powerhouse of finance, culture and skyscrapers.

For over a century, the world has looked up at her, but did you know you can actually climb inside and look back out at the city she watched grow?

A Quick History of the Statue

The Statue of Liberty is a marvel of 19th century engineering.

The outside looks like a solid sculpture, but it is actually made of 350 individual copper panels that are only about as thick as two pennies. Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi designed and sculpted the statue, while Gustave Eiffel, the same guy who designed the Eiffel Tower, built a flexible iron framework for the inside. That framework allows the statue to sway and flex in the wind without damaging the structure.

The statue’s survival is a constant battle against the ocean air, oxidation and rust.

A massive restoration was undertaken in the 1980s to replace the corroded iron with stainless steel and line the connections with Teflon tape to help prevent corrosion. They even had to replace the torch. The famous green color is actually the oxidation of copper (I think almost everyone knows this). We envision her as green, but imagine seeing her when she was copper brown.

There are people who live in NYC and scoff at the idea of doing touristy things. I’ve never really understood that. Just because you live in one of the most visited cities in the world doesn’t mean you should avoid the things that make it worth visiting. There’s something about experiencing the city the way a tourist would, at least once. You can live here for years and still have new things to see and do.

The Statue of Liberty is certainly touristy, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. If you’ve never been, I think it’s worth going. Part of fully experiencing a city is allowing yourself to do the things it’s known for, even if they’re tourist attractions. And we weren’t just visiting the Statue of Liberty, we were climbing to the crown.

There is a long wait to get tickets for the crown because only a limited number of people are allowed to go up. We booked our tickets in March for the end of June, a two month wait.

When you finally make it inside the Statue of Liberty, climbing to the crown is a completely different experience from simply seeing the statue from the outside. It’s amazing to see the Statue of Liberty from the inside and even more amazing when you consider how thin the actual copper panels are. From the inside you can see the support structure as it follows the form of the sculpture. It’s a marvel when you consider the time, effort and engineering that went into building it.

The crown is smaller than you imagine. A single spiral staircase, narrow enough for only one person at a time, brings you to the top. There was barely room for the four of us up there, plus two additional park rangers.

It was hot but not terrible. The little arched windows of the crown could open and were open to let the breeze in. The rangers monitored the temperature, telling us that if it gets too hot, they don’t let people up because it can become like an oven.

We probably spent about 10 minutes in the crown taking photos and admiring the view. Eventually, a small line of people formed waiting to be let up, so we knew our time had come to an end. We started the journey out, which was a separate set of tight spiral stairs going down.

I’m glad we made the effort to do it.

After climbing to the crown, we made our way over to the Statue of Liberty Museum, which is worth checking out while you’re on the island.

Relatively new, the museum opened in 2019 and was designed by the New York firm FXCollaborative. It’s beautifully designed and houses the original torch, the centerpiece of the museum.

The museum is housed inside a dramatic, soaring glass space. When you stand inside the gallery, you can look at the original torch up close and then look through the glass walls to see the replica torch high up on the statue in the distance beyond.

For a city that has so many landmarks, it’s easy to take the Statue of Liberty for granted when you live here. Especially because you can see it from a lot of differences places around the city. But climbing inside the statue and standing beneath the crown gave me a different appreciation for it. Sometimes doing the touristy thing is something you should do.

I have a video that I put together of the climb while wearing Meta glasses, but haven’t been able to export it from the app yet.