New York, Day 2: Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island

One of the things I love to do when traveling is walk.  Places have different feels on foot.  I discover unexpected sights, stumble onto happy surprises. Today, T. and I walked from the hotel to Battery Park to catch the ferry to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.  There are several ways to get from Brooklyn to where we were going.  One is the Brooklyn Bridge.  Here is T.R. with some artistic expressions of the creators of that bridge.

The plan was to take the pedestrian path across the bridge, but somehow we accidentally ended up on a ferry instead.  It wasn’t what I planned, but it worked and we got to walk along the water to the park.

In the park, we found the fish carousel, which, of course, we rode.  T. automatically sticks out his tongue when I point the camera at him.  His face may eventually freeze that way.

Then we got on our intended ferry to the statue.  This was my favorite part:

I know what I want my country to be and we so often fall short.  I hope we can continue to strive to be a place of refuge in the world, made strong by all the people who come here to create a better life.

At Ellis Island, I felt somehow let down by the overviews.  While there was some acknowledgment of the past failures we have made (Native American genocide, the involuntary “immigration” of slavery, the Chinese exclusion, the quotas, etc.), there was not a sense of apology.  It was as if those wrongs existed only in the past and have had no repercussions down to present times.  The best witness to the history of the place was the space itself, especially on the top floor where there are oppressive little rooms and institutional corridors that give a sense of the dehumanizing nature of the process.

Here are a couple of pictures from the museum, one from the outside with (surprise!) a reflection in it and the other from an upstairs window with a view of some of the exterior.

We did manage to walk back across the Brooklyn Bridge and refreshed ourselves with pizza.