Statue of Liberty Crown

On the first day of June, three friends and I had Crown tickets for the Statue of Liberty. I had been to Liberty Island twice before, and rode by the Lady many times on the Staten Island Ferry but I had never been inside of the statue or the pedestal.

It was actually back in February, on one of those Staten Island Ferry trips, that Jim mentioned that he'd never been to Liberty Island. I told him that I'd go with him, but that I'd like to see if we could get inside. I did some research when I got home and discovered that access to the crown was kind of hard to get — there is a very limited number of tickets available each day, and they sell out months in advance. You can only order four tickets per household, and can place one order every six months. I went out on a limb and asked my friends what they were doing in June, picked a date, marked my calendar and kind of forgot about it. Then, suddenly it's June 1st and four of us are on a boat headed over to Liberty Island.

We totally lucked out weather-wise, especially considering we booked our tickets more than three months in advance — it was brilliantly sunny with hardly a cloud in the sky and warm but not the least bit humid with a nice breeze off the water. Once we got to the island, we had to go through a separate screening process to actually get into the statue and because we were going all the way up into the crown we were only allowed to take one camera per person and everything else went into a locker.

Immediately inside the statue is the original torch that was removed and replaced with the current one in 1984 due to deterioration. There is also a museum in the base but we headed straight to the stairs to start our climb: 377 steps, to be exact, from the main lobby to the crown platform. You're free to walk around the pedestal observation deck as well, which we did to break up the climb.

Even if you can't get crown tickets, I highly recommend at least getting inside the pedestal. It was pretty crowded, but the views are great and definitely a better way to see the statue than from ground level alone.

The climb from the pedestal to the crown is the scary part — you are forced into this tiny, cramped, claustrophobic-nightmare of a spiral staircase that begins to feel like it will never end (there are a few resting points on the climb up) but then, suddenly it does and you find yourself standing inside the head of one of the most famous statues in the world.

I feel dumb even admitting this, but for some reason I thought that the crown would be an open-air platform, although if I really think about it I have no clue why that idea was in my head. It is definitely an enclosed space — there are windows, a few of which were open, but they're teeny tiny. The entire space is tiny, in fact, and with the four of us, two park rangers and a few other people who came up after us, it got cramped real fast.

It's kind of hard to see much of anything out of the tiny windows, but if you crouch down and look hard enough for good angles, you can see the tablet, some crown spikes and her hand holding the bottom of the torch. It is pretty awesome to see the inside of such an iconic statue — the squiggly lines on the ceiling are her hair, and as you walk back down you can see the indentations of her eyes and nose.

It's incredibly fascinating to see how much complicated infrastructure is hiding inside all of those folds and I took my time coming back down, trying to take it all in. I definitely recommend trying to get crown tickets, if you can — when we were there I overheard that they were already booked up until September, but I can't imagine it's very pleasant on the super hot summer days anyway.

I think I'm pretty much good on seeing the Statue of Liberty for now, although it did cross my mind that I would like to see her covered in snow (it's open every day of the year except Christmas). We were also lamenting the fact that we couldn't go up in the torch — until we found out that it's actually been closed to the public since 1916.