July 18, 2001

12:55 AM

"Project Echoes Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island" the headline goes. Looks more to me like it echoes "Planet of the Apes." Nice idea, but can we get a different design, please?
posted by Bixby23 (10 comments total)

You gotta wonder how he missed the resemblance. Or maybe Tim Burton is behind this somehow, to hype his remake.
posted by Ezrael at 1:04 AM on July 18, 2001

Is that Liberty being swallowed up by the Pentagon (plus one side you aren't allowed to mention)? A Mexican pyramid being built over America? Or is she just going down for the third time in a digitized ocean?
posted by pracowity at 1:24 AM on July 18, 2001

Isn't that dude a wee bit old for Lego?
posted by dong_resin at 1:55 AM on July 18, 2001

You are never too old for Legos...or Lincoln Logs.
posted by canoeguide at 2:07 AM on July 18, 2001

If it's to welcome immigrants to the western US wouldn't it be more appropriate to build it on the end of a runway somewhere? If you put it in SF Bay no one who's being welcomed by it is being welcomed by it.
posted by vbfg at 5:32 AM on July 18, 2001

A rejected set from Logan's Run...
posted by Wizzle at 5:58 AM on July 18, 2001

This looks like a student prank.

No, really. Way back when, there was a group at the University of Wisconsin called the Pail and Shovel party. They ran for the Student Council on a number of bizarre campaign promises, including bringing the Statue of Liberty to Madison, and won. That winter, they made good on their promise and airlifted the statue to Wisconsin; unfortunately, the only place to set the statue down was in the middle of a frozen lake. Even more unfortunately, the ice couldn't bear the weight, so the statue broke through and sank into the lake.

Of course, this could just be part of a plot to turn the population of SF into mutants...
posted by harmful at 6:05 AM on July 18, 2001

Lawrence Ferlinghetti mused over a similar idea. Although she wouldn't be swallowed up in his vision.
posted by mblandi at 8:20 AM on July 18, 2001

I want to say I'm not exactly opposed to the idea, I just think that if they really want to do it, they should do it. Build a complete replica at full scale.

I'll leave the cynical wisecracks to another post.
posted by Ezrael at 9:54 AM on July 18, 2001

They ought to have a railroad leading to a detention camp. To capture the full flavor of the Asian immigration experience, natch.

I'd rather not dilute the original with a replica (the one in Paris is plenty; though the Austin re-interpretation is interesting.) The problem I have with this proposal is that it's simultaneously too literal and too abstract: the literal re-creation of the arm looks, as noted, weird; and the hexagram platform is meaningless. The Gateway Arch in St. Louis is an example of abstraction that works wonderfully. Maybe this is too much simply a monument; the original is a welcoming symbol that represented something very real to arriving immigrants, but this would tend to be more of a memorial to immigrants who weren't quite so welcome, and it certainly doesn't serve the same symbolic purpose.

Like the probably-inevitable World War Two memorial on the Mall ... it's a good idea, well-intentioned, but the execution stinks.
posted by dhartung at 7:45 PM on July 18, 2001