Sunday, May 25, 2008

The Jersey Side



Her back has to face somewhere, I guess.

4 comments:

Linda said...

I can't find the lyrics of the ragtime song my grandfather sang about the Jersey side. There's a similar one with other lyrics at http://parlorsongs.com/issues/2003-8/thismonth/feature.asp ...

Cap's version went "The statue faces toward the bay, Ashamed to look the other way, Over on the Jersey Side."

Anonymous said...

technically, isn't the statue in jersey, but ny somehow managed to claim it as their own?

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Ed Ward said...

That reminds me of another Jersey monument, the statue of Tulane in the Princeton cemetary. Apparently he was expelled from Princeton as an undergrad for the petty crime of trying to burn down Nassau Hall, the university's signature building. Outraged, he vowed to someday build a university that would rival Princeton.

Somehow, he wound up in New Orleans, and, at any rate, founded a university which bears his name. When he died, they discovered that he'd bought a plot in Princeton and left money for a statue of him to be erected with its back turned to Nassau Hall, and a furious scowl on his face.

They knew how to nurse grudges on those days!

Marie Javins said...

RE: The ownership of Liberty Island. As you can see, the statue itself is so close to NJ that I can take a reasonable photo with my point-and-shoot. Technically, I think it's in NJ waters, but NY owns the island, or something like that.

The National Park Service is in charge (the Feds).

Why, you might ask, would anyone care who owns the little piece of land the statue is on when in fact the Feds oversee it anyway?

Tax revenues. On ferry tickets, concessions, anything people buy on the island. A not-that-small fortune in tax revenues. That's why NY and NJ squabble over Liberty Island.