Are pets allowed on Liberty Island?
A. Not yours, aside from service animals. But National Park Service personnel bring in sheep dogs to humanely chase away Canada geese. Q. Have there been suicides there? A. Nice question. OK, according to historian Moreno, two, both of them men who jumped. The first, by a Brooklyn lad, was in 1929, not over the stock market crash but reportedly over an unrequiting female. The other victim, in 1997, was a Senegalese immigrant; his motivation was unclear. Q. How did Emma Lazarus’ poem “The New Colossus” come to be on the statue? A. It never has been on the actual statue. The 1883 poem–containing the memorable “Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . .”– was written to help raise money for the pedestal (it netted $1,500 at auction) and was affixed to the inner walls of that pedestal in 1903 as a tribute to Lazarus, who died of cancer in 1887 at age 38. It has moved around some, but it’s still in there, in an area off-limits, since September 2001,
