Statue of Liberty crown tickets sold out until Labor Day
While the Statue of Liberty is on track to reopen her crown to the public on the Fourth of July, tickets to climb up her steps are already all-but sold out through the Labor Day weekend.
Tickets first went on sale June 13 and demand was so high that the website and telephone lines were difficult to access. (The website has been slow again this morning.)
Only 30 people per hour will be allowed to take the stairs to the crown under escort from a National Park Service ranger.
It’s important to note that currently the plan is to keep the crown open for two years only. After that, it will close again for a project to make the interior safer to visitors and hopefully allow more people to visit each day.
The crown has been closed since Sept. 11, 2001, mainly for fire safety reasons, the National Park Service has long said. The torch has been closed to the public since 1916, when Liberty’s arm was damaged by a massive rail yard explosion in nearby New Jersey. There are no plans to ever reopen the torch to the public.
What you need to know to get tickets to the Statue of Liberty’s crown:
Crown tickets can be reserved up to a year in advance through Statue Cruises, the only company licensed to ferry the public to Liberty and Ellis islands. The $3 crown fee will be on top of the regular ferry ticket, currently priced at $12 for adults, $10 for seniors and $5 for children. Tickets can be purchased online or by calling 877- LADY-TIX (877-523-9849) between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m., Eastern time.
A free Open House Family Day is scheduled for Sunday (from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.) with a lion dance, kung fu demonstration and dance performance. Admission will also be free this Friday (from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.) and Saturday (from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.)
The actual Celebration Ceremony will take place September 22, which is also when the museum will unveil the full MOCA core exhibit, “With a Single Step: Stories in the Making of America” along with MOCA’s first group show, “Here & Now: Chinese Artists in New York.”
Until then, the museum will only be open select days this summer and for events such as the The First Asian American ComiCon and The 32nd Asian Ameican International Film Festival.
And starting next week, admission to the museum will be free every Thursday from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., thanks to sponsorship from Target.
In preparation of its goodbye-1980s-renovation, the New York Helmsley Hotel has paid for the creation of an online archive that seeks to document the history before it changes.
Though to read New York Helmsley Archives, you may see history change before your eyes. Leona Helmsley is indeed omnipresent on the new website, though mainly for her unparalleled attention to detail.
She was remembered quite differently elsewhere, such as in her 2007 New York Times obituary, which started this way: Leona Helmsley, the self-styled hotel queen whose prison term for income tax evasion and fraud was greeted with uncommon approval by a public who regarded her as a 1980s symbol of arrogance and greed. …”
The hotel renovation — with a design by Jeff Ornstein, new individual registration desks with Macassar Ebony wood chairs and a Barovier & Toso Murano Italian glass chandelier — will be complete by the end of the year. The hotel, located at 212 E. 42nd St., map, will remain open throughout.
Spectacular High Line park opens on elevated railway
The High Line today unofficially opened half a day early, debuting an elevated space that will undoubtedly turn into Manhattan’s new favorite thing.
In the first hours it was open, people were lounging about, splashing bare feet in the water installation under benches facing the Hudson, taking lunch on the amphitheater steps that now make 10th Avenue look like a stage, and there was even a picture-perfect couple dressed for a wedding.
Already, there is something passionately New York about it. The brilliantly designed space embraces the city’s juxtapositions — it is old and new, for rich and poor, crass and quiet, public yet intimate. Quick-and-dirty condos appear to grow from the same grass as the Empire State Building. Frank Gehry’s modern IAC Building appears as half a bookend to a billboard often plastered with high-fashion models in various stages of faux-orgasm.
The High Line itself was built in the 1930s to move the big freight trains off the West Side streets. Abandoned since the 1980s, the rail line was threatened with demolition until the Friends of the High Line was founded with the crazy idea to turn it into a park.
The High Line will be open every day from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. For now, only one phase is open (up to 20th Street,) and you can enter at Gansevoort and Washington streets, map.
The High Line also opens with a major, though temporary art installation by Spencer Finch in association with Creative Time. “The River That Flows Both Ways,” is 700 individual panels of glass — in hues of blues, purples and greys — fitted into the original High Line window panes that allowed light into the bay of the Nabisco building. Finch plays with parallels between the rail line, where trains ran north and south — and the Hudson, which is not actually a river, but an estuary, and flows “both ways” during each day.
The park will be open daily from 7a.m. to 10 p.m. with limited use during June due to anticipated crowds.
“After ten years of advocacy, planning, and construction, the High Line is opening. Section 1 of the High Line (from Gansevoort Street to 20th Street) will open Tuesday, June 9, offering visitors the chance to preview the park, which is still under construction,” Friends of the High Line writes in its newsletter announcing the opening.
More details from the newsletter:
To ensure public safety during the first days and weeks that the High Line is open, visitors on the High Line will flow from south to north. Please plan on entering the park at the Gansevoort Street access point, unless you are in need of an elevator. Elevator service is available at 16th Street, with another elevator opening in July at 14th Street. You may exit the park at any of the access points (Gansevoort, 14th, 16th, 18th and 20th Streets).
The park remains under construction on an elevated rail tracks used by freight trains since the 1930s. Sitting abandoned on the West Side, the Friends of the High Line formed to raise funds to turn the space into a public park. For a live view of a section, see the webcam for The Standard hotel, (pictured,) which straddles a section of the High Line in the Meatpacking District.
Architectural salvage shop Olde Good Things is expanding with a new store in the Union Square area, the company said Wednesday in its new items newsletter.
Pierre reopens on Central Park with rooms from $537
The Pierre officially reopened its doors Monday on Central Park after a $100 million renovation to its 189 guest rooms.
Summer room rates start at $537 through September 7. (In March, the hotel’s website said it would open June 1 with an “Early Bird Promotion” rate of $816.) Currently the website lists rates as high as $2,175 for a night in the premier suite.
First opened in October 1930, the Pierre was designed by Schultze & Weaver, the same firm that designed the nearby Sherry-Netherland, as well as the Waldorf-Astoria.
Rooms now feature Turkish marble bathrooms, wall-mounted 40-inch flat-screen high-definition TVs, high-def DVD players, Bose Wave Studio with iPod docking stations, high-speed wired and wi-fi Internet access, as well as laptop safes with charging capabilities.
Almost all of the rooms were completed in time for the re-opening, except for a few of the 49 suites, a hotel representative told NewYorkology.
The hotel’s new restaurant, Le Caprice, is on track to open late this summer. Room service is available now.
Image source: Deluxe king bedroom, Pierre website.
Governors Island's old jail with Lady Liberty views
A New York Times column today about the up-in-the-air fate of Guantanamo detainees toys with the notion of moving them to Governors Island in the middle of New York Harbor.
What the story neglects to mention is that the island is already home to a well-used jail: Castle Williams.
Built from 1807 to 1811, no shot was ever fired in anger from the fortification, however it later housed Civil War prisoners who were no doubt angry - as well as sick, due to the unsanitary conditions there.
“It was not a very pretty place,” a National Park Service ranger said during a Governors Island tour on Friday. Thirty to 60 prisoners — only enlisted men were housed in Castle Williams — were kept in each cell, with no sanitation, no running water.
Castle Williams was a military prison up until 1963, just before the U.S. Army left Governors Island. When the Coast Guard moved in, it was used as youth community center and later a landscape shop.
During the NPS tours — which are free on Wednesdays and Thursdays — you can look into one of the cells, but you can’t yet go inside. The recent batch of stimulus funds in the U.S. Economic Recovery Plan includes about $5 million to stabilize the building, Mindi Rambo, an NPS assistant public affairs officer, told NewYorkology.
Eventually the cells will open to the public and exhibits will be placed inside, if all goes as planned. That is, unless the Guantanamo detainees become the inhabitants of the round, red fortification.
Tugs & dry docks: Hidden Harbor Tours set '09 dates
The not-for-profit Working Harbor Committee has released the 2009 dates for its popular summer cruises that take in not just the sites of sparkling Americana but also the rusted industrial past and what’s left of the working waterfronts of New York and New Jersey.
The narrated Hidden Harbor Tours are set for June 15, July 14, August 18 and September 15.
(Update: The July date was originally scheduled for July 21.)
Billed as an insider’s tour, guests will include staff from the Port Authority of NY/NJ, the major shipping terminal operators in the harbor, and the New York City Empire Development Corporation’s Maritime Division. They’ll tell you all about the sights — from the giant container ships and tugboat yards to the graving docks and oil terminals on the harbor.
The tour boat — Circle Line’s Zephyr — will travel from Manhattan’s Pier 16 at the South Street Seaport to Brooklyn Piers, Buttermilk Channel, Erie Basin, Upper New York Harbor, Kill Van Kull, Port Newark, Port Elizabeth, Military Ocean Terminal and Global Marine Terminal, Statue of Liberty and the tip of Manhattan.
High Line sneak peak before the park opens in June
As the “June” grand opening of the High Line park approaches, the Sundance Channel has released some online clips of its new series that profiles some of the key people who have helped morph the 1.5-mile elevated railway into a park in the sky.
