October 28, 1886: The Statue of Liberty Is Dedicated

October 28, 1886: The Statue of Liberty is dedicated in New York Harbor, on Bedloe's Island, soon to be renamed Liberty Island. As the men who officially dedicated it dock at The Battery at the southern tip of Manhattan afterward, and walk back up to City Hall, men working in the buildings overlooking Broadway throw tape from stock tickers out the window, thus spontaneously inventing the ticker-tape parade.

It was intended as a gift from France to America on the 100th Anniversary of independence, in 1876. Unfortunately, while the French government was willing to supply the materials, the Americans would have to pay for their shipping across the Atlantic Ocean, and for their assembly. It took 10 years to raise enough money to do that.

The designer was Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, age 52 when the statue was dedicated. It's been said that Lady Liberty's face was that of Bartholdi's mother, while her body was that of his mistress. He lived until 1904.

His actual name for the statue was La Liberté éclairant le monde: Liberty Enlightening the World, hence her right arm raised, holding a torch. In her left arm is a tablet, inscribed with JULY IV MDCCLXXVI -- the date on the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776. Under her sandaled feet are broken chains, symbolizing the abolition of slavery. France had abolished slavery in its African colonies in 1848, 17 years before America did so on her own shores.

The Statue became a symbol of hope to immigrants once the immigration station opened at adjacent Ellis Island in 1892. In 1903, a bronze plaque was mounted inside the pedestal's lower level, inscribed with the text of a poem written by Emma Lazarus, in 1883 in preparation for the statue: "The New Colossus." Comparing Lady Liberty to the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the long-gone Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, Lazarus wrote:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Previously, America had been symbolized in feminine form by a generic woman named "Columbia," for Christopher Columbus. In time, Lady Liberty would become America's feminine form, the way Uncle Sam became its masculine form.

The Statue's outer shell is made of copper, so she started out a deep brown, which may have pissed off some white supremacists. Over time, however, as copper does, she turned a light green.

From those sandaled feet to the tip of her torch, Lady Liberty stands 151 feet, 1 inch high. From the bottom of the pedestal on the island to the tip of the torch, 305 feet, 1 inch.

Visitors can take a ferry from Lower Manhattan to Liberty Island, and ride to her crown, and look out over New York Harbor and the City. Access to the torch has been disallowed since 1916, when the Statue took shrapnel from the Black Tom Explosion in nearby Jersey City, New Jersey.

And while Liberty Island and adjacent Ellis Island are closer to New Jersey than to any part of the State of New York, officially, they are in the State of New York.

In 1984, a massive renovation project began. For nearly 2 full years, the Statue was covered by scaffolding. On July 4, 1986, the Statue was rededicated with a massive fireworks display.

Many movies use the Statue as an establishing shot to show that they're set in New York. Sometimes, this backfires: The 1st and 3rd Superman movies with Christopher Reeve appear to show the State of Liberty -- and also the original World Trade Center and the Empire State Building -- as being in Superman's fictional hometown of Metropolis.

And when movies want to suggest that disaster has struck New York, they use the Statue, either damaged (its head clawed off by the Cloverfield monster) or as part of a ruin (in the twist ending of the original 1968 version of Planet of the Apes).

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October 28, 1886 was a Thursday. The baseball season was over. Football was in midweek. Hockey was still all-amateur. And basketball hadn't been invented yet. So there were no scores on this historic day.

July 30, 1916: The Black Tom Explosion

July 30, 1916: German saboteurs set off what becomes known as the Black Tom Explosion in Jersey City, New Jersey.

"Black Tom" sounds like it might be a racially insensitive nickname. In fact, it was a munitions depot on an island on the New Jersey side of New York Bay, within sight of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Up until the breakout of World War I on August 1, 1914, munitions companies in America, which was then neutral in the war, could sell to any country. But with the outbreak of the war, Britain's Royal Navy blockaded Germany, and so only the Allied powers -- Britain and its Empire, France and its colonies, and the Russian Empire -- could buy American munitions.

So, just as they would in World War II a generation later, the German Empire sent saboteurs to America to mess with our ability to help their enemies. On July 29, 1916, about 2 million pounds of ammunition were stored at Black Tom, in freight cars and on barges, waiting to be shipped to Russia. After midnight, so it was now July 30, some small fires were found on the pier.

The pier was evacuated, and the Jersey City Fire Department was called in. At 2:08 AM, Johnson Barge No. 17 exploded, sending 50 tons of TNT up in smoke and flames. Several firemen were thrown into the air, some of them out of their boots. It registered at 5.5 on the Richter scale, making it equivalent to a serious earthquake. 

The explosion destroyed over 100 railroad cars and 13 warehouses, and left a 375-by-175-foot crater. Debris struck the Statue of Liberty's arm, and, for safety's sake, her  torch has been off-limits to human occupancy ever since. Fragments flew a mile away to Journal Square, striking the clock tower of The Jersey Journal newspaper, stopping the clock at 2:12 AM. Windows were broken all over New York City. The Brooklyn Bridge shook. The explosion was felt 90 miles away in Philadelphia.

The evacuation was mostly successful: The death toll was kept down to 4. With no FBI and no CIA at the time, and only Jersey City Police and New Jersey State Police available to investigate, finding out who actually set off the explosions proved impossible. If there was any punishment for Germany, it came after President Woodrow Wilson, who ran for re-election in 1916 on the slogan, "He kept us out of war," could do so no longer, and asked for a Declaration of War on April 2, 1917, and got it on April 6.

Landfill eventually connected the island to the Jersey City mainland, and what had been Black Tom Island is now part of Liberty State Park. A monument is now on the site.

Six months later, on January 11, 1917, another American munitions plant exploded in New Jersey, 11 miles to the northwest, in Lyndhurst. The Kingsland Explosion caused a lot of damage, but no deaths. German sabotage was suspected, but never proven.

On October 4, 1918, still another American munitions plant exploded in New Jersey, 27 miles to the south of Black Tom, in Sayreville. The Morgan Explosion killed over 100 people. Again, German sabotage was suspected, but an investigation revealed this one to be an accident.

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July 30, 1916 was a Sunday. Actor Dick Wilson was born on that day, best known for playing Mr. Whipple in commercials for Charmin toilet paper from 1965 to 1989: "Please don't squeeze the Charmin!"

In baseball, as it turned out, the entire American League played that day, and the entire National League did not:

* The New York Yankees were swept by the St. Louis Browns in a doubleheader at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis. The Browns won the opener, 2-1, as Ernie Koob outpitched George Mogridge. The Browns won the nightcap, 2-0, as Eddie Plank outpitched Ray Fisher. No home runs were hit in either game. This was still the Dead Ball Era.

* The Washington Senators beat the Cleveland Indians, 2-1 in 10 innings at League Park in Cleveland. Walter Johnson outpitched fellow future Hall-of-Famer Stan Coveleski.

* The Boston Red Sox beat the Detroit Tigers, 9-3 at Navin Field in Detroit. It was renamed Briggs Stadium in 1938 and Tiger Stadium in 1961. Duffy Lewis and Larry Gardner each got 3 hits for the Red Sox. Babe Ruth did not play for them. Ty Cobb did play for the Tigers, going 3-for-3 with a walk and 2 RBIs.

* The Chicago White Sox swept a doubleheader from the Philadelphia Athletics at Comiskey Park in Chicago. The Pale Hose won the 1st game 10-1, and the 2nd game 7-0.

May 10, 1876: The Centennial Exhibition

Memorial Hall

May 10, 1876: The Centennial International Exhibition of 1876, the first official World's Fair to be held in the United States, opens in Philadelphia, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in the city, on July 4, 1776.

Officially named the International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures, and Products of the Soil and Mine, it was held in Fairmount Park, along the Schuylkill (SKOOL-kill) River, northwest of what's now known as Center City, on fairgrounds designed by Herman J. Schwarzmann. Nearly 10 million visitors attended the exposition, and 37 countries participated in it. It ran until November 10, when colder weather made keeping it going impractical.

A 1,000-foot Centennial Tower was proposed, but never built. (World's Fairs that did build towers have included the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris with the Eiffel Tower, the 1939 New York World's Fair with the Trylon, and the 1962 Century 21 Exposition in Seattle with the Space Needle.) But the right arm and torch of the still-incomplete Statue of Liberty were on display, and fees collected to stand in the torch and view the fair helped raise money for the Statue's completion.

There was an Agricultural Hall, a Horticultural Hall, a Machinery Hall, a Women's Pavilion, and a few other themed exhibition areas. Among the new products shown for the first time at this fair were Alexander Graham Bell's telephone, the Remington No. 1 typewriter, Heinz ketchup and Hires root beer.

The Exhibition was intended not only to celebrate the 100th Anniversary of American independence, but to show that America was coming out of the economic depression that had been caused by the stock market's Panic of 1873. The celebrations were meant to peak on Centennial Day, July 4, 1876. Unfortunately, that was the day that word reached Philadelphia by telegraph of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, where Native American tribes routed the U.S. Army's 7th Cavalry, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer in the Montana Territory, putting a damper on the big day.

The fair was a mixture of the Gilded Age and the pain of the depression brought about by the Panic of 1873, and the strain that the Wild West was putting on the nation.

One of the few remaining buildings from the Exhibition is Memorial Hall. Since 2005, it has housed the Please Touch Museum, an interactive museum for children.

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May 10, 1876 was a Wednesday. Baseball was America's only professional team sport at the time, and the National League had just begun its 1st season. Only one games was played: The Chicago White Stockings beat the Cincinnati Reds, 6-0 at the State Street Grounds in Chicago.

The White Stockings went on to win the NL's 1st Pennant. They went through some name changes until, by 1903, they were known as the Chicago Cubs, and the American League team founded in 1901 had become the Chicago White Sox.

But the team they beat on this day went out of business after the 1879 season. The team known today as the Cincinnati Reds started play in 1882, and has no connection to the earlier Reds, or to the Cincinnati Red Stockings who, in 1869 and 1870, were the first openly professional baseball team. So, when today's Reds claim to be "the oldest professional baseball team," they are lying: The Cubs are, having been established in 1870.