[Thursday], July 4, 1986
Liberty Weekend
The Statue of Liberty celebrates its 100th birthday. It has been renovated and overhauled from the bottom up. On the occasion of the centennial, this Fourth of July Weekend has been declared the “Liberty Weekend.” The festivities for it were prepared long before. President Reagan and French President Mitterand opened the great festivities last night. In a show, which most likely can only be put on in America, the events are now taking place. It started with last night’s big fireworks in the Harbor of New York. Today, the large sailing vessels of 18 nations passed the Statue of Liberty and moved up the Hudson River, a spectacle reminiscent of the parade of sailing vessels ten years ago during the Bicentennial celebrations of 1976. President and First Lady Nancy Reagan are at the center of this big public festival, which immediately evoked a new wave of patriotism.
[The Statue of Liberty was a present of France to the United States. In 1876, during the Centennial of the Declaration of Independence, France proposed to give America a monument in memory of the French-American cooperation during the War of Independence. F.A. Bartholdi was commissioned to create an appropriate monument. Bartholdi designed a gigantic statue, which should be cast in copper. It was an allegorical female figure that symbolizes liberty. The finished work was on display in Paris on the Fourth of July of 1884. Thereafter, the various parts were disassembled and shipped across the Atlantic. The 152 feet high Statue of Liberty was set up on Bedloe’s Island, a small island at the entrance to New York Harbor. It was formally unveiled and dedicated in October of 1886. In 1924 the Statue of Liberty was declared a national monument, and in 1956 Bedloe’s Island was renamed Liberty Island. In 1965 the National Park Service combined Liberty Island and Ellis Island, the small island in front of Manhattan, to the Statue of Liberty National Monument.]
In the decades after its dedication, the Statue of Liberty became for millions of immigrants the symbol of freedom, just as it has become for the world the symbol of America. Next to the renovation of the Statue of Liberty and Liberty Island, special attention has been given to the restoration of Ellis Island, the most important immigration station in American history. From its opening in 1892 to its closing in 1954, about 17 million immigrants, mostly from Central, Southern and Eastern Europe, were processed. Nearly half of the American population can trace their origin to Ellis Island.
[The newly renovated main building of the Immigration Station on Ellis Island was opened in 1990 to the public as Ellis Island Immigration Museum. There, everybody can look up the Immigration Register and search for their passage ancestry.]
Saturday, July 6, 1986
The Concert
Tonight, at the conclusion of the Liberty Weekend, the long-awaited great open-air concert was given in the Central Park of New York City. The New York Philharmonic under the direction of Zubin Mehta played a favorite classical repertoire for the nearly 600,000 people who had come to hear them. Television broadcast impressive pictures of this event. The music of Haydn, Verdi, and Beethoven resounded against the backdrop of the lit skyline of New York and the shining Statue of Liberty. The “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony had, in front of all these people of every kind of origins and in their festive mood, a special effect. Rarely have the words, “seid umschlungen, Millionen” (multitudes, be embraced), sounded as genuine as on this evening.