It had been a quarter of a century since I'd called on Miss Liberty.

I don't think she really missed me - she's always had a lot of visitors - but it was certainly good to see the old girl again. Especially since she got a face lift a few years ago for her 100th birthday.Most people know her as the Statue of Liberty, but to me she's more than the conglomeration of metal and rock conjured by that appellation.

I call her Miss Liberty: The first American face to greet the millions of immigrants sailing into New York harbor. The personification of the America men and women fought for in foreign wars. An unchanging symbol of greatness we celebrate - in both good times and bad - when we set off the fireworks on the Fourth of July.

And even though I've seen her from afar many times - and in countless photographs - it's something else to visit this green goddess in person.

She is, in a word, awesome. From any angle, she exudes strength and security. There's something very special about being in her presence.

Miss Liberty stands on a small islet in New York harbor, though maps show her to be in New Jersey waters. That's an issue of more than passing interest: The Supreme Court is now considering whether the island - and the substantial sales tax revenues rung up at its tourist kiosks - should belong to New Jersey instead of New York.

Still, Miss Liberty's a New Yorker in the eyes of most everybody. ("If the founding fathers had wanted her to be in New Jersey, she wouldn't be facing New York," former New York Mayor Ed Koch once quipped, noting that residents of Liberty Island - all seven of them - vote in New York.) And it is in New York City - at the tip of Manhattan island - that most visitors board the ferry that sails to Liberty Island.

On disembarking, many visitors head straight for the line to the 354 steps that rise to the crown of the statue. This is a pretty intimidating queue - a full hour on a light visitation day, a ranger told me, two hours in the busy summertime.

I took the shorter line, for the elevator that goes to the top of the 89-foot-high granite pedestal. From the observation deck there, I got a wonderful view of downtown Manhattan's skyscrapers. Inside, I could see the spiraling line of visitors on the stairs leading to the viewing windows in the Miss Liberty's crown. "Only 168 steps to go!" one weary stair-climber yelled out as he plodded upward.

(Don't think, by the way, that you can ride the elevator to the top of the pedestal and then join the line to the crown at that point. Rangers stand at the ready here to thwart would-be line-cutters.)

While visitors can still reach the renovated crown, they are no longer allowed to climb up the arm to the torch.

Negotiating the stair up the arm was sometimes unnerving, explained Ranger Charles Walker. "More than one person who felt it sway, as it would in the wind, grabbed the nearest support and refused to move. Then other people couldn't move up or down.

"Imagine that headline in a London newspaper: `People stuck in armpit of Liberty!"'

At the pedestal's top level, you can look up and see the beginning of the statue, the first folds of her copper skirt. There's not much to see, but at least you get an idea of how she is put together. A much better understanding of how she is built - and how she came to be - comes in the base of the pedestal, which houses a fascinating museum.

This is not simply a collection of papers recalling the history of the statue. It contains models and replicas, huge molds used to hammer out Miss Liberty's features, and the darndest collection of kitsch I've ever seen - the Statue of Liberty reproduced on, among other things, trays, spoons, plates, lamps, mugs, menorahs, crocheted items, cartoons and postcards. One display has the Marx Brothers cast as a trio of Miss Libertys.

How the statue came to be, however, is a more serious subject.

Perhaps you know the story: How French republicans, chafing under the repressive regime of Napoleon III, conceived the statue, which would represent the triumph of democracy in the United States, as a way to keep alive their similar ideals in France while strengthening the friendship between the two countries.

It was Edouard Rene Lefebvre de Laboulaye, a French scholar and authority on America, who proposed this idea at a dinner party in 1865. One of his guests, the then-young sculptor Auguste Bartholdi, embraced the notion, and went to America in 1871 to propose the monument and choose a site. Inspired by the colossal statues of old - particularly by the Colossus that straddled the harbor of Rhodes - Bartholdi proposed a huge statue at the entrance to New York harbor. In 1869, he had designed such a statue for the entrance to the new Suez Canal, a gigantic figure of an Egyptian peasant woman holding aloft a torch, her headband lighted as a lighthouse. When the Egyptian pasha suggested changes unacceptable to Bartholdi, he abandoned the project.

Bartholdi always denied that his design for "Liberty Enlightening the World," as the French called the Statue of Liberty, was merely a revised Lady of the Suez Canal, but the similarities are quite evident. Models of the Suez statue can be seen in the museum.

The sculptor started fabricating Miss Liberty in 1875, enlarging his models several times until he had 300 full-sized plaster sections. The copper skin was formed by the repousse process, in which metal sheets 2.5 millimeters thick were hammered into shape against wooden forms made from the plaster sections.

Several wooden forms are on view in the museum, as well as two full-scale copper sections - Liberty's face and her left foot. Each toe is big enough for a person to sit on. The same hammering technique, by the way, was used in the renovation of the 1980s.

Supporting such a gigantic metal personage as Miss Liberty almost proved a stumbling block. But in 1879 Batholdi called in Gustav Eiffel, the famous engineer who later created the tower that bears his name for the Paris Exposition of 1889. For Miss Liberty, Eiffel designed a novel framework - an internal skeleton - from which her metal skin was hung. This new technique, which became known as curtain wall construction, revolutionized architecture and made possible the later erection of skyscrapers. An eight-foot cutaway model in the museum shows Eiffel's ingenious design.

Building the statue was one thing; raising money for it was another. For five years, fund-raising events were held in France. Then as now, the statue's image was used to bring in funds. The museum displays such items as a round Camembert box decorated with the statue, wine bottles with a Liberty label and dozens of statuettes.

Meanwhile, in the United States, a campaign was launched to raise $300,000 to build the pedestal, which America had agreed to fund. Similar mementos and souvenirs were marketed during that eight-year fund drive.

To stir up interest, Miss Liberty's arm and torch were exhibited at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, but to little effect. It was not until Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the New York World, began a newspaper fund-raising campaign that enough money rolled in to assure that the statue would have a home in the United States.

And so it was that on Oct. 28, 1886, Miss Liberty was formally welcomed to America with a mighty celebration. More than 100 bands and 20,000 people marched in a three-hour parade. Hundreds of boats surrounded the statue, where President Grover Cleveland told the assemblage, "We will not forget that Liberty has here made her home."

An intriguing aside: Dedication day was a public holiday, but not for Wall Street workers. So office boys in the financial district, wanting to join in the fun, unreeled spools of tape used to record changing stock prices, sending curling streamers of paper down on the paraders from office windows. Thus was born the ticker tape parade.

Miss Liberty soon came to be a symbol of America, her likeness was used in countless ways to inspire the populace.

Many of these patriotic images are on view in the museum, as well as others which have used Miss Liberty for commercial purposes. There's a whole wall of memorabilia using Miss Liberty to sell everything from rock music and cigars to soap and savings banks.

And, of course, the tradition still holds today. Just take a walk into Liberty's own gift shop.

Some of the current outpouring of doodads with Miss Liberty's likeness can be traced to the two-year restoration of the statue. (A schematic display in the museum explains the extensive repairs.) Besides giving Miss Liberty a bath, workers had to replace corroded supports, remake portions of her skin and build a completely new torch, gilded as Bartholdi had intended. The old torch, lit from within after a series of window-cutting alterations, now rests in the base of the pedestal.

The new torch, and a radiant Miss Liberty, were feted on her 100th birthday with one of America's biggest celebrations, a four-day Liberty weekend in 1986 that had six million people converging on Lower Manhattan, 30,000 vessels scooting around the harbor and a $2-million fireworks show, the largest pyrotechnical display in American history.

Miss Liberty did us proud then. She still does today.

Ferries that take the 2.5 million annual visitors to Liberty Island also call at Ellis Island, through which more than 12 million immigrants were processed. The restored center now is known as the Ellis Island Immigration Museum.

It was here that immigrants were held and examined before being allowed to enter the country. A Family History Center that would list the names of all 12 million immigrants was proposed several years ago, but it is not yet a reality.

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Meanwhile, anyone who wants to have their own name (or anyone else's) engraved here on the Roll of Honor can do so by paying $100 to the Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, (212) 883-1986. Originally the names were placed on the seawall as part of a fund-raising program; a separate wall now has been built behind the museum and the names transferred there on stainless steel.

HOW TO GET THERE: National Park Service ferries to Liberty Island depart from the tip of Manhattan every half hour from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Cost is $6 for adults, $3 for children through age 17. Ferries also depart from Liberty Park in New Jersey. The ferries also stop at Ellis Island at no extra charge.

BEST TIME TO VISIT: Early mornings, weekdays. Lines on summer weekends are often two hours or more. In summertime, the National Park Service advises allowing four to five hours for a visit; in winter, at least two hours.

INFORMATION: (212) 363-3260.

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