Pickle Soft Serve, Lady Liberty, and Rubbing Elbows With Mark Twain

First, an update: I didn’t, as you probably noticed, see a Broadway show with Jesse Green tonight. Due to unforeseen circumstances, he was unavailable to review the show tonight, and I’m seeing the same one tomorrow afternoon with Laura Collins-Hughes, a New York Times freelance theater critic whose work I also read a lot of. So hooray (for me, at least)!

Now, back to today’s originally scheduled plan: The Statue of Liberty. Visiting both Liberty and Ellis Islands is a full-day investment. It took me about six hours from the time my ferry to Liberty Island left Battery Park to the time my ferry from Ellis Island returned.

I booked a 10 a.m. ticket this morning (if you want to visit both islands, you have to take a morning ferry), and it was cloudy and looked like it was going to rain when I arrived at the dock. Fortunately, the rain held off, and my ferry wasn’t packed with people like the return one was (more on that debacle in a minute).

My first stop was Liberty Island, home to the Statue of Liberty and the new, just-opened-in-May Statue of Liberty Museum. I took a free ranger-guided tour of the island, which is a national park. My ranger guide said this is the first summer in years that the island actually looks the way it's supposed to (the culprits: Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and the subsequent repairs, then the construction of the new museum).

One intriguing tale I learned today was that of the involvement of Joseph Pulitzer in the Statue of Liberty. He funded the construction of the statue's pedestal after the United States ran out of money to pay for it.

Pulitzer raised $102,000 for the pedestal from more than 140,000 people by promising to print the name of anyone who donated in his paper. He didn't, however, tell anyone which day their name would appear, guaranteeing he'd sell thousands of additional copies.

Another fun fact: Statue of Liberty sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s mother served as the model for the statue’s face. Bartholdi’s wife was the model for the arms and torso (guess her face didn’t make the cut?!).

If you visit Liberty Island, in my opinion, you have the choice of a ranger-guided tour, an audio tour, a visit to the museum, or the half-hour movie. Doing all four would be overkill, as you’re really just looking to learn the history of the island and statue, which all four methods accomplish with significant overlap. I took a ranger tour and visited the museum, and even that involved a lot of overlap. All of which is to say, you don’t *have* to do a tour if you visit the museum, but, then again, you can just take a quick jaunt through the museum if you do a tour.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get a pedestal or crown ticket to actually go up in the statue. Crown tickets sell out months in advance, and I couldn’t stalk them this spring because I didn’t yet know my schedule. Pedestal tickets, which allow you to go inside the statue’s base, are easier to get, but you still have to request them weeks in advance, and, again, I didn’t know my schedule that far ahead of time. All of which just means I have a reason to come back (as well as that rain check with Jesse Green)!

Next up this afternoon was Ellis Island, which was an immigration inspection station for more than 60 years before it was closed in 1954. You take a ferry from Liberty Island over to Ellis Island's free, three-level museum. You can also tour the grounds, including the former residences and hospital buildings, but that’s a separate tour that you have to buy in advance (and which costs $60!). So, it was the free museum for me.

Inside the museum, you can walk through the registry room, also known as the “Great Hall,” where the immigrants who arrived on Ellis Island were inspected, with the weakest among them weeded out and sent back home (terrible, right?). There are also three floors of exhibits about who the immigrants were who came to America, what conditions were like in their home countries, and how they were treated at Ellis Island, as well as what day in their lives would have been like.

Here’s one of my favorite interactive displays in my museum (I spent way too long playing with it).

You can choose any nationality, and the program will show you a heat map of where Armenians, Mexicans, Americans, Swedes, Iranians, etc. are concentrated in the United States today. It was interesting to see who lives in Indiana.

O.K., now time for the less fun part of the day.

If you visit the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, be prepared to wait. A lot.

And, if it’s a sunny day, bake.

A lot.

I spent about two hours on Liberty Island, and 90 minutes wandering through the museum on Ellis, but the rest of that six hours was me either riding or waiting for ferries. The ferries between Liberty and Ellis Islands and Battery Park depart from each of the three stops every 20 minutes, which sounds fine until you realize that there are many more people who want to board each ferry than each boat can fit (particularly when boarding on Ellis Island, as many passengers already on the boat from Liberty Island don’t disembark at the Ellis Island stop, instead taking the ferry from Liberty Island straight back to Manhattan).

I had a feeling when I got off the ferry at Ellis Island that I’d have to wait through a few ferries to come back to Manhattan, but it took me until the FIFTH FERRY to finally catch one. To emphasize, the boat ride between Ellis Island and Battery Park takes less than 10 minutes. But fewer and fewer people disembarked at Ellis Island from each ferry as the afternoon wore on, meaning the growing swarm of people trying to get home was left in a holding pen, with only about one-fifth of us making it on each ferry. It’s a good thing it was cloudy and breezy — if it were over 100 degrees and humid like it has been lately, I’d have tapped out (the waiting area to board the ferry is uncovered).

The wait was so bad that if I had to do this over, I’d strongly consider heading straight back to Manhattan from Liberty Island. Statue Cruises needs to figure out a better system for visiting Ellis Island, because right now you’re penalized with agonizingly long return wait times if you choose to visit Ellis in addition to Liberty, since passengers returning from Liberty Island get to board each ferry first (which is a terrible system).

Anyway — rant over. Since I now had a free evening after my theater plans got moved to tomorrow, I realized I was now free to seek the far-uptown pickle ice cream I mentioned in an earlier post. Hooray!

So, I hopped on the D train to Lucky Pickle Dumpling Co. on Amsterdam Avenue for some pickle soft serve.

Don't be deceived — this confection is largely hollow, and so not quite as towering as it at first appears (but still rather impressive).

The best part was the three crispy, kettle chip-like pickles. The actual ice cream tasted like lime sherbet, and was nothing special — I wanted it to be much stronger than it was.

Also on the menu: Popcorn ice cream! I'd try that one, too, but based on the pickle, I think I'd be disappointed.

As I was walking along 43rd Street tonight, I also happened to look down an alley I walk by all the time, but had never noted before. And then I saw this:

Yes, the nation’s national debt clock is literally hidden in an alley. And Google Maps doesn’t even have the right address for it — it’s on 43rd Street, not 44th. It’s pretty depressing to watch the clock tick up, up, and up all day and night.

Finally, tonight’s literary adventure took me eight streets uptown and four avenues over from my East Village apartment, to Mark Twain’s former residence on 10th Street. Sadly, you can’t go inside, but it was still pretty Twain-tastic.

And today in NYC food highlights, Part 2 (kind of): The birdhaus bao from Baohaus in the East Village.

I'd originally intended for this to be the fantastic Chairman Bao (Berkshire pork belly with relish, crushed peanuts, Taiwanese red sugar, and cilantro), but they were all out today.

So, enjoy this quality second choice: The Birdhaus Bao (fried chicken, lemon-garlic aioli, crushed peanuts, Taiwanese red sugar, and cilantro).

Only three days left before I fly back to Indy! Conveniently, pickle ice cream-questing is also a way for me to procrastinate on packing up my apartment.