October 28 · This Day in America
Rain falls on New York, and nobody cares. A million people line the streets for the parade; clerks on Wall Street fling ticker tape from the windows, inventing a tradition by accident. Out in the harbor, a copper woman stands two hundred feet tall, a gift from France, paid for in part by the pennies of ordinary Americans who answered a newspaper's plea. President Grover Cleveland presides as the French tricolor is meant to fall from her face on cue — but the sculptor, overcome, yanks the rope too early, and Liberty is unveiled to a roar that drowns the speeches. She was conceived as a monument to a friendship between republics. She would become something larger: the first American thing millions of immigrants ever saw, a torch held up at the edge of the country that said, whatever else is true, you can begin again here.
Source: www.nps.gov
Also on this day · 1965
Two stainless-steel legs have been rising toward each other for two years, and engineers warned the margin for error at the top was almost nothing. Crews spray the sun-warmed south leg with water to shrink it, jack the gap open, and slide the final keystone section home. Six hundred thirty feet up, the two halves meet within fractions of an inch. America's tallest monument — a perfect, gleaming curve over the Mississippi — is closed.
Source: www.nps.gov
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”Emma Lazarus, "The New Colossus," 1883