A Pair of American Islands

By KURT ANDERSEN

Who cares about the Statue of Liberty? By modern high-rise standards, it is dinky, a dozen stories from head to toe. And by the standards of statuary, Lady Liberty is absurdly huge, unnecessarily literal, a giant trinket as vulgar as a sign on the Las Vegas strip. It is hardly an ancient monument. Except for Richard Morris Hunt's pedestal, the thing was not even Made in America. (Perfect protectionist irony: an imported patriotic icon.)

Who cares about the Statue of Liberty? Everyone, it seems, over the age of two from sea to shining sea. For whether the statue is too small or too big or too corny, it is by far the most American of all the country's patriotic shrines: unabashedly showy, technically impressive, evangelically democratic, & erected with private funds--and now privately restored as well, with $70 million from a quarter-billion-dollar treasury raised by a showy, impressive, all-American son of immigrants named Lee Iacocca.

Less than half a mile across the water is Ellis Island, a darker, more 20th century place. The same pot of cash is subsidizing the renovation of the historic island and the transformation of its main building into a multimedia immigration museum. "Some people say we should concentrate on Miss Liberty," says Iacocca, chairman of the private Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, "and forget about Ellis Island, because the memories from there weren't too pleasant. They're wrong. We need both. This country was not built on hope alone. It took a lot of pain."

Anonymous pain vs. heroic pizazz, a crucible vs. a crowd pleaser. A low, labyrinthine, long-abandoned Government compound and a high, bright, popular symbol. The place where the undesirables among the huddled masses were culled out and sent packing; the monument that summarizes in one grand, gilded-age stroke a nation's noblest intentions. The two islands make a compelling yin- and-yankee pair. Alone, neither the Mother of Exiles nor the Island of Tears fairly represents the American story. But together, they tell something like the whole truth.

The five-year restoration has been difficult. Agendas and aesthetics clashed. The islands are U.S. property, administered by the National Park Service, but the restoration money was doled out by Iacocca's foundation. The islands also have, in this secular republic, almost religious status. Even if there had been a single guiding hand, almost every design decision was bound to displease somebody.

The technical challenges were also substantial and often without precedent. Who knew, for instance, how to remove built-up layers of paint and coal tar from the statue's delicate 100-year-old copper interior? The Lehrer-McGovern construction-management company has had to manage a considerable logistical feat: on Liberty Island alone, they coordinate the work of four different architectural and engineering firms, dozens of individual contractors and, during the 2 1/2 years of construction, some 500 craftsmen and hard-hat workers.

Since April, crews have been working 18 hours a day on Liberty Island. The pitch seemed both unusually feverish and collaborative one bright, windy afternoon last week. There is no pushing back this Friday's deadline. Up in the statue's crown, a Mexican worker--an immigrant!--put finishing touches on new interior copper sheathing, while Project Architect John Robbins of the Park Service complimented the man on his finesse at riveting an eccentric, angular piece of metal.

Inside the statue, most of the angles are eccentric, which made the whole job appealing and difficult for the engineers. The copper skin had been fastened to the superstructure by means of more than 1,800 iron armature bars, all different shapes and sizes. At the rate of just twelve a day, the armatures have been replaced by individually forged steel bars. The exterior, blemished by acid rain and 100-year accretions of bird excrement, was bathed and scrubbed. Only two bits of grafting were necessary: the tip of the nose and some hair curls are new copper.

Ad hoc solutions were devised. The gloppy layers of interior paint were frozen off with a sprayed treatment of supercold liquid nitrogen. Bolts holding the statue to the pedestal, each fastened with a nut as big as a layer cake, were tightened with a 30-ton hydraulic jack. Only one radical renovation was undertaken: Liberty's torch is entirely new. The old handle had corroded badly, and the flame had been replaced in 1916 by a leaky, kitschy amber-glass contraption. (It is now on display in the new granite entrance lobby, designed by the firm of Swanke Hayden Connell.) Appropriately, twelve French artisans were imported to fashion a new torch. They needed a year to make a plywood mold, take a plaster cast of the wooden form, make a metal mold over which reinforcing concrete was poured, and finally fashion the repousse copper flame itself--then cover it in nearly a pound of 24-karat gold leaf.

From a visitor's point of view, the greatest change involves the 192-step walk up to the top. The old enclosing stair tower was replaced by a more open spiral, and the statue's copper interior has been illuminated. As a result, the upward passage through the dramatic, Gaudian space is now at least half the fun, intriguing and slightly mysterious.

From Architect John Burgee's pleasant new wooden Liberty Island pier, the trip over to Ellis Island takes just five minutes. The anxious immigrant's view toward Liberty must have been a bit ominous: the perspective from Ellis is of the statue's back, her cold shoulder. Of the 17 million who disembarked there, some 300,000 were deported, deemed medically or politically unfit to become Americans. Given the mass of people who passed through, though, Ellis Island's history is humane: 80% who arrived were in and out within a few hours. Yet today, roaming the decrepit, shadowy, once functional buildings, certain grim resonances are inescapable. These are Government buildings, after all, through which millions of Europeans were herded, bureaucratically categorized and judged.

The common experience of Ellis Island fostered a fitting sort of quasi- kinship among U.S. citizens: nearly half of all Americans today can trace their lineage through the enormous main registry hall. Last week, as two visitors strolled the rich, elegiac ruin, a workman spontaneously announced his family connection with the place. "My grandmother came here when she was 17 years old," he shouted, "with nothing but a suitcase full of oranges. A suitcase full of oranges!"

Ellis Island, a 33-building campus packed onto 27 acres, is almost as complex architecturally as it is emotionally. For a place not really so old (construction lasted from 1890 to 1935 off and on) and built for quick-and- dirty bureaucratic use, much of the compound is astonishingly lovely. The basic style is French Renaissance revival; the materials are brick, limestone and copper. The hospital, on the south side of the ferry slip, is a particularly pretty beaux-arts jewel box.

Of the thousands of ceiling tiles in the main building's vaulted, 58-ft.- high registry hall, only a few dozen needed replacing. In addition to restoring the 20-ft. by 20-ft. dormitory spaces (three families to a room), one wing of the main building will include new exhibition space and two theaters designed by the firm Beyer Blinder Belle. A broad entrance ramp covered by a vast canopy, original elements of the main building, will be rebuilt, but in unmistakably modern materials and forms. "We are trying to emulate the original designs but not trying to fool people in a Disney World sense," says Brooklyn-born Architect Michael Adlerstein, the enthusiastic Park Service manager of the Ellis Island restoration. "If it looks old, it is old." By the way, offers Adlerstein, his Russian mother came through Ellis as an infant.

The most evocative residue from those days are hundreds of graffiti scrawled on walls with pencils, knives and chalk in dozens of languages. As the restorers heated the building to bake out years of sea moisture, paint flaked off, revealing these immigrant artifacts. One Chinese graffito penciled on a bathroom wall is raw, wonderful poetry: "Thinking of home brings tears. I don't know what day we can be freed from our worries. Fathers, brothers, wives, children have scattered. Lucky just to arrive in the Flowery Flag country. I expected peace with no worries."

The overlap of responsibilities between private and public agencies has meant no peace and plenty of worries. "It's a clumsy bureaucracy," Adlerstein admits good-naturedly. Most disputes have been small. Burgee, architect of the new Liberty Island plaza, had a recent week long argument with the Park Service over the proper color (his white vs. its gray) of outdoor chairs. After 15 phone calls he surrendered.

One of the fights, however, became bitter: what to do with the southern, 17-acre half of Ellis Island. The Park Service has been inclined to turn the old hospital and its 17 ancillary buildings into a $65 million to $75 million scholarly conference center designed by the firm of Conklin Rossant. Iacocca and Burgee, on the other hand, pushed a $100 million to $150 million scheme to create what Iacocca called an ethnic Williamsburg, including a big new glass exhibition pavilion. Last February the dispute became public when Interior Secretary Donald Hodel fired Iacocca as chairman of the federal Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Centennial Commission (though Iacocca remained the head of the foundation that raises and dispenses renovation funds).

"It would be a little bit like Disneyland," admits Burgee of his plan for a permanent pseudointernational folk festival. "It's a little bit like colonial Williamsburg too. Is it bad to have some fun?" James Rossant derides the Iacocca-Burgee vision as "a potpourri of half-baked ideas." Says Rossant: "Every building must be restored exactly as the immigrant saw them." His conference center would be "a living use of the land, one that is intelligent and serious, inspired and inspirational, not silly and cheap like ethnic dances, children in wood shoes, and ethnic foods." A decision will be made by Jan. 1. The betting is on the conference-center scheme, to which Iacocca has recently dropped his opposition.

Debates over the restorations of Liberty Island and Ellis Island, and the relative importance of each, have at times seemed almost theological: each occupies a critical, distinct niche in the national mythology. Yet both are being repaired in the same, characteristic national fashion: a combination of technical ingenuity, can-do spirit, ambivalence about preservation and a ferocious patriotic pride. Two very different, very important islands--two American islands--are being redeemed.

With reporting by Cathy Booth/New York